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Prophets of Dissent: Essays 
on Maeterlinck, Strindberg, 
Nietzsche and Tolstoy 



by 

Otto Heller 

Professor of Modern European Literature 
in Washington University (St. Louis) 



Is there a thing in this world that can be separated from 

the inconceivable ? 

Maeterlinck, "Our Eternity" 




New York -^ Mcmxviii 

Alfred A Knopf 



COPYRIGHT, 191 8, BY 
ALFRED A. KNOPF 



<\l»\ 



<v 



PUNTED IN UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

JUN 27 1918 

©CU497984 



To 
HELLEN SEARS 

staunchest of friends 



Preface 

The collocation of authors so widely at variance 
in their moral and artistic aims as are those as- 
sembled in this little book may be defended by 
the safe and simple argument that all of these 
authors have exerted, each in his own way, an 
influence of singular range and potency. By fair- 
ly general consent they are the foremost literary 
expositors of important modern tendencies. It 
is, therefore, of no consequence whether or not 
their ways of thinking fit into our particular 
frame of mind; what really matters is that in this 
small group of writers more clearly perhaps than 
in any other similarly restricted group the basic 
issues of the modern struggle for social transfor- 
mation appear to be clearly and sharply joined. 
That in viewing them as indicators of contrari- 
ous ideal currents due allowance must be made 
for peculiarities of temperament, both individual 
and racial, and, correspondingly, for the purely 
"personal equation" in their spiritual attitudes, 
does not detract to any material degree from their 
generic significance. 

[vii] 



Preface 

In any case, there are those of us who in the 
vortical change of the social order through which 
we are whirling, feel a desire to orient ourselves 
through an objective interest in letters among the 
embattled purposes and policies which are now 
gripped in a final test of strength. In a crisis 
that makes the very foundations of civilization 
quake, and at a moment when the salvation of 
human liberty seems to depend upon the success 
of a united stand of all the modern forces of life 
against the destructive impact of the most primi- 
tive and savage of all the instincts, would it not 
be absurdly pedantic for a critical student of lit- 
erature to resort to any artificial selection and co- 
ordination of his material in order to please the 
prudes and the pedagogues ? And is it not natural 
to seek that material among the largest literary 
apparitions of the age? 

It is my opinion, then, that the four great au- 
thors discussed in the following pages stand, re- 
spectively, for the determining strains in a great 
upsetting movement, and that in the aggregate 
they bring to view the composite mental and moral 
impulsion of the times. Through such forceful 
articulations of current movements the more per- 
cipient class of readers have for a long time been 

[|viii] 



Preface 

enabled to foresense, in a manner, the colossal re- 
construction of society which needs must follow 
this monstrous, but presumably final, clash be- 
tween the irreconcilable elements in the contrasted 
principles of right and might, the masses and the 
monarchs. 

However, the gathering together of Maeter- 
linck, Nietzsche, Strindberg, and Tolstoy under 
the hospitality of a common book-cover permits 
of a supplementary explanation on the ground of 
a certain fundamental likeness far stronger than 
their only too obvious diversities. They are, one 
and all, radicals in thought, and, with differing 
strength of intention, reformers of society, inas- 
much as their speculations and aspirations are 
relevant to practical problems of living. And yet 
what gives them such a durable hold on our atten- 
tion is not their particular apostolate, but the 
fact that their artistic impulses ascend from the 
sublimal regions of the inner life, and that their 
work somehow brings one into touch with the hid- 
den springs of human action and human fate. 
This means, in effect, that all of them are mystics 
by original cast of mind and that notwithstanding 
any difference, however apparently violent, of 
views and theories, they follow the same introspec- 

[ix] 



Preface 

tive path towards the recognition and interpreta- 
tion of the law of life. From widely separated 
ethical premises they thus arrive at an essentially 
uniform appraisal of personal happiness as a func- 
tion of living. 

To those readers who are not disposed to grant 
the validity of the explanations I have offered, 
perhaps equality of rank in artistic importance 
may seem a sufficient criterion for the association 
of authors, and, apart from all sociologic and 
philosophic considerations, they may be willing to 
accept my somewhat arbitrary selection on this 

single count. 

O. H. 
April, 19 1 8. 



M 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I Maurice Maeterlinck: a study in Mysti- 
cism 3 

II August Strindberg: a study in Eccen- 
tricity 71 

III Friedrich Nietzsche: a study in Exalta- 

tion 109 

IV Leo Tolstoy: a study in Revivalism 161 



MAURICE MAETERLINCK 



THE MYSTICISM OF MAURICE MAETERLINCK 

UNDER the terrific atmospheric pressure 
that has been torturing the civilization of 
the entire world since the outbreak of the 
greatest of wars, contemporary literature of the 
major cast appears to have gone into decline. 
Even the comparatively few writers recognized 
as possessing talents of the first magnitude have 
given way to that pressure and have shrunk to 
minor size, so that it may be seriously questioned, 
to say the least, whether during the past forty 
months or so a single literary work of outstanding 
and sustained grandeur has been achieved any- 
where. That the effect of the universal embattle- 
ment upon the art of letters should be, in the 
main, extremely depressing, is quite natural; but 
the conspicuous loss of breadth and poise in writ- 
ers of the first order seems less in accordance 
with necessity, — at least one might expect a very 
superior author to rise above that necessity. In 

[3] 



Prophets of Dissent 

any case it is very surprising that it should be a 
Belgian whose literary personality is almost 
unique in having remained exempt from the gen- 
eral abridgment of spiritual stature. 

It is true that Maurice Maeterlinck, the most 
eminent literary figure in his sadly stricken coun- 
try and of unsurpassed standing among the con- 
temporary masters of French letters, has, since 
the great catastrophe, won no new laurels as a 
dramatist; and that in the other field cultivated 
by him, that of the essay, his productiveness has 
been anything but prolific. But in his case one is 
inclined to interpret reticence as an eloquent proof 
of a singularly heroic firmness of character at a 
time when on both sides of the great divide which 
now separates the peoples, the cosmopolitan trend 
of human advance has come to a temporary halt, 
and the nations have relapsed from their labo- 
riously attained degree of world-citizenship into 
the homelier, but more immediately virtuous, state 
of traditional patriotism. 

It is a military necessity as well as a birth- 
right of human nature that at a time like the 
present the patriot is excused from any pharisaical 
profession of loving his enemy. Before the war, 
Maeterlinck's writings were animated by humani- 

[4] 



Maurice Maeterlinck 

tarian sympathies of the broadest catholicity. He 
even had a peculiar affection for the Germans, be- 
cause doubtless he perceived the existence of a 
strong kinship between certain essential traits in 
his spiritual composition and the fundamental ten- 
dencies of German philosophy and art. But when 
Belgium was lawlessly invaded, her ancient towns 
heinously destroyed, her soil laid waste and 
drenched with the blood of her people, Maeter- 
linck, as a son of Belgium, learned to hate the 
Germans to the utmost of a wise and temperate 
man's capacity for hatred, and in his war papers 
collected in Les Debris de la Guerre, (1916), 1 
which ring with the passionate impulse of the pa- 
triot, his outraged sense of justice prevails over 
the disciplined self-command of the stoic. 

He refuses to acquiesce in the lenient discrimi- 
nation between the guilty Government of Germany 
and her innocent population: "It is not true that 
in this gigantic crime there are innocent and guilty, 
or degrees of guilt. They stand on one level, all 
those who have taken part in it. ... It is, very 
simply, the German, from one end of his country 
to the other, who stands revealed as a beast of 
prey which the firm will of our planet finally re- 

lM The Wrack of the Storm," 19 16. 
[5] 



Prophets of Dissent 

pudiates. We have here no wretched slaves 
dragged along by a tyrant king who alone is re- 
sponsible. Nations have the government which 
they deserve, or rather, the government which 
they have is truly no more than the magnified and 
public projection of the private morality and men- 
tality of the nation. . . . No nation can be de- 
ceived that does not wish to be deceived; and it 
is not intelligence that Germany lacks. . . . No 
nation permits herself to be coerced to the one 
crime that man cannot pardon. It is of her own 
accord that she hastens towards it; her chief has 
no need to persuade, it is she who urges him on." 

Such a condemnatory tirade against the despoil- 
ers of his fair homeland was normally to be ex- 
pected from a man of Maeterlinck's depth of feel- 
ing. The unexpected thing that happened not 
long after was that the impulsive promptings of 
justice and patriotism put themselves into harmony 
with the guiding principles of his entire moral 
evolution. The integrity of his philosophy of life, 
the sterling honesty of his teachings, were thus 
loyally sealed with the very blood of his heart. — 
"Before closing this book," he says in the Epi- 

lu The Wrack of the Storm," pp. 16-18. 

[6] 



Maurice Maeterlinck 

logue, 1 "I wish to weigh for the last time in my 
conscience the words of hatred and malediction 
which it has made me speak in spite of myself." 
And then, true prophet that he is, he speaks forth 
as a voice from the future, admonishing men to 
prepare for the time when the war is over. What 
saner advice could at this critical time be given 
the stay-at-homes than that they should follow 
the example of the men who return from the 
trenches? "They detest the enemy," says he, "but 
they do not hate the man. They recognize in him 
a brother in misfortune who, like themselves, is 
submitting to duties and laws which, like them- 
selves, he too believes lofty and necessary." On 
the other hand, too, not many have sensed as 
deeply as has Maeterlinck the grandeur to which 
humanity has risen through the immeasurable 
pathos of the war. "Setting aside the unpardon- 
able aggression and the inexpiable violation of the 
treaties, this war, despite its insanity, has come 
near to being a bloody but magnificent proof of 
greatness, heroism, and the spirit of sacrifice." 
And from his profound anguish over the fate of 
his beloved Belgium this consolation is wrung: 

1 In the English translation this is the chapter preceding the 
last one and is headed "When the War Is Over," p. 293 ff. ; it 
is separately published in The Forum for July, 1916. 

[7] 



Prophets of Dissent 

"If it be true, as I believe, that humanity is worth 
just as much as the sum total of latent heroism 
which it contains, then we may declare that hu- 
manity was never stronger nor more exemplary 
than now and that it is at this moment reaching 
one of its highest points and capable of braving 
everything and hoping everything. And it is for 
this reason that, despite our present sadness, we 
are entitled to congratulate ourselves and to re- 
joice." Altogether, Maeterlinck's thoughts and 
actions throughout this yet unfinished mighty fate- 
drama of history challenge the highest respect for 
the clarity of his intellect and the profoundness of 
his humanity. 

The appalling disaster that has befallen the 
Belgian people is sure to stamp their national char- 
acter with indelible marks; so that it is safe to 
predict that never again will the type of civiliza- 
tion which before the war reigned in the basins 
of the Meuse and the Scheldt reestablish itself in 
its full peculiarity and distinctiveness which was 
the result of a unique coagency of Germanic and 
Romanic ingredients of culture. Yet in the amal- 
gam of the two heterogeneous elements a certain 
competitive antithesis had survived, and mani- 
fested itself, in the individual as in the national 

[8] 



Maurice Maeterlinck 

life at large, in a number of unreconciled tempera- 
mental contrasts, and in the fundamental unlike- 
ness exhibited in the material and the spiritual ac- 
tivities. Witness the contrast between the bustling 
aggressiveness in the province of practical affairs 
and the metaphysical drift of modern Flemish art. 
To any one familiar with the visible materialism 
of the population in its external mode of living 
it may have seemed strange to notice how sedu- 
lously a numerous set among the younger artists 
of the land were facing away from their concrete 
environment, as though to their over-sensitive 
nervous system it were irremediably offensive. 
The vigorous solidity of Constantin Meunier, the 
great plastic interpreter of the "Black Country" 
of Belgium, found but few wholehearted imitators 
among the sculptors, while among the painters 
that robust terrestrialism of which the work of a 
Rubens or Teniers and their countless disciples 
was the artistic upshot, was almost totally relin- 
quished, and linear firmness and colorful vitality 
yielded the day to pallid, discarnately decorative 
artistry even, in a measure, in the "applied art" 
products of a Henri van de Velde. 

It is in the field of literature, naturally enough, 
that the contrast is resolved and integrated into 

[9] 



Prophets of Dissent 

a characteristic unity. Very recently Professor 
A. J. Carnoy has definitely pointed out 1 the 
striking commixture of the realistic and imagina- 
tive elements in the work of the Flemish symbol- 
ists. u The vision of the Flemings" — quoting from 
his own precis of his paper — "is very concrete, 
very exact in all details and gives a durable, real, 
and almost corporeal presence to the creations of 
the imagination. All these traits are exhibited in 
the reveries of the Flemish mystics, ancient and 
modern. One finds them also no less plainly in 
the poetic work of Belgian writers of the last 
generation: Maeterlinck, Verhaeren, Rodenbach, 
Van Lerberghe, Le Roy, Elskamp, etc." 

If we take into account this composite attitude 
of the Flemish mind we shall be less surprised at 
the remarkable evolution of a poet-philosopher 
whose creations seem at first blush to bear no re- 
semblance to the outward complexion of his own 
age; who seems as far removed temperamentally 
from his locality and time as were his lineal spirit- 
ual ancestors: the Dutchman Ruysbroeck, the 
Scandinavian Swedenborg, the German Novalis, 
and the American Emerson — and who in the 

1 In a paper read by title before the Modern Language Asso- 
ciation of America at Yale University, December 29, 1917. 

[10] " 



Maurice Maeterlinck 

zenith of his career stands forth as an ardent advo- 
cate of practical action while at the same time a 
firm believer in the transcendental. 

Maeterlinck's romantic antipathy towards the 
main drift of the age was a phenomenon which at 
the dawn of our century could be observed in a 
great number of superior intelligences. Those 
fugitives from the dun and sordid materialism of 
the day were likely to choose between two avenues 
of escape, according to their greater or lesser 
inner ruggedness. The more aggressive type 
would engage in multiform warfare for the re- 
construction of life on sounder principles; whereas 
the more meditative professed a real or affected 
indifference to practical things and eschewed any 
participation in the world's struggle for progress. 
And of the quiescent rather than the insurgent 
variety of the romantic temper Maurice Maeter- 
linck was the foremost exponent. 

The "romantic longing" seems to have come 
into the world in the company of the Christian re- 
ligion with which it shares its partly outspoken, 
partly implied repugnance for the battle of life. 
Romantic periods occur in the history of civiliza- 
tion whenever a sufficiently influential set of ar« 
tistically minded persons have persuaded them* 



Prophets of Dissent 

selves that, in quite a literal sense of the colloquial 
phrase, they "have no use" for the world; a dis- 
covery which would still be true were it stated 
obversely. The romantic world-view, thus funda- 
mentally oriented by world-contempt, entails, at 
least in theory, the repudiation of all earthly 
joys — notably the joy of working — and the re- 
nouncement of all worldly ambition; it scorns the 
cooperative, social disposition, invites the soul to 
a progressive withdrawal into the inner ego, and 
ends in complete surrender to one sole aspiration : 
the search of the higher vision, the vision, that is, 
of things beyond their tangible reality. To such 
mystical constructions of the inner eye a certain 
group of German writers who flourished in the 
beginning of the nineteenth century and were 
known as the Romantics, darkly groped their way 
out of the confining realities of their own time. 
The most modern spell of romanticism, the one 
through which our own generation was but yester- 
day passing, measures its difference from any pre- 
vious romantic era by the difference between 
earlier states of culture and our own. Life with 
us is conspicuously more assertive and aggressive 
in its social than in its individual expressions, which 
was by no means always so, and unless the ro- 

[12] 



Maurice Maeterlinck 

mantic predisposition adapted itself to this impor- 
tant change it could not relate itself at all intimate- 
ly to our interests. Our study of Maeterlinck 
should help us, therefore, to discover possibly in 
the new romantic tendency some practical and 
vital bearings. 

We find that in the new romanticism esthetic 
and philosophical impulses are inextricably mixed. 
Hence the new movement is also playing an indis- 
pensable role in the modern re-foundation of art. 
For while acting as a wholesome offset to the so- 
called naturalism, in its firm refusal to limit inner 
life to the superficial realities, it at the same time 
combines with naturalism into a complete recoil- 
ing, both of the intellect and the emotions, from 
any commonplace, or pusillanimous, or mechani- 
cal practices of artistry. This latter-day romanti- 
cism, moreover, notwithstanding its sky-aspiring 
outstretch, is akin to naturalism in that, after all, 
it keeps its roots firmly grounded in the earth; 
that is to say, it seeks for its ulterior sanctions not 
in realms high beyond the self; rather it looks 
within for the "blue flower" of contentedness. Al- 
ready to the romantics of old the mystic road to 
happiness was not unknown. It is, for instance, 
pointed by Novalis: "Inward leads the mysteri- 

[13] 



Prophets of Dissent 

ous way. Within us or nowhere lies eternity with 
its worlds; within us or nowhere are the past and 
the future." Viewed separately from other ele- 
ments of romanticism, this passion for retreating 
within the central ego is commonly referred to as 
mysticism ; it has a strong hold on many among the 
moderns, and Maurice Maeterlinck to be proper- 
ly understood has to be understood as the poet par 
excellence of modern mysticism. By virtue of this 
special office he deals mainly in concepts of the 
transcendental, which puzzles the ordinary person 
accustomed to perceive only material and ephem- 
eral realities. Maeterlinck holds that nothing 
matters that is not eternal and that what keeps us 
from enjoying the treasures of the universe is the 
hereditary resignation with which we tarry in the 
gloomy prison of our senses. "In reality, we 
live only from soul to soul, and we are gods who 
do not know each other." x It follows from this 
metaphysical foundation of his art that instead of 
the grosser terminology suitable to plain realities, 
Maeterlinck must depend upon a code of subtle 
messages in order to establish between himself 
and his audience a line of spiritual communication. 
This makes it somewhat difficult for people of 

1 Maeterlinck, "On Emerson." 



Maurice Maeterlinck 

cruder endowment to appreciate his meaning, a 
grievance from which in the beginning many of 
them sought redress in facile scoffing. Obtuse 
minds are prone to claim a right to fathom the 
profound meanings of genius with the same ease 
with which they expect to catch the meaning of 
a bill of fare or the daily stock market report. 



It must be confessed, however, that even those 
to whom Maeterlinck's sphere of thought is not 
so utterly sealed, enter it with a sense of mixed 
perplexity and apprehension. They feel them- 
selves helplessly conducted through a world situ- 
ated beyond the confines of their normal conscious- 
ness, and in this strange world everything that 
comes to pass appears at first extremely impracti- 
cable and unreal. The action seems "wholly dis- 
severed from common sense and ordinary uses;" 
the figures behave otherwise than humans; the 
dialogue is "poised on the edge of a precipice of 
bathos." It is clear that works so far out of the 
common have to be approached from the poet's 
own point of view. "Let the reader move his 
standpoint one inch nearer the popular stand- 
point," thus we are warned by Mr. G. K. Chester- 
ton, "and his attitude towards the poet will be 

[15] 



Prophets of Dissent 

harsh, hostile, unconquerable mirth." There are 
some works that can be appreciated for their 
good story, even if we fail to realize the author's 
moral attitude, let alone to grasp the deeper con- 
tent of his work. "But if we take a play by Mae- 
terlinck we shall find that unless we grasp the par- 
ticular fairy thread of thought the poet rather 
lazily flings to us, we cannot grasp anything what- 
ever. Except from one extreme poetic point of 
view, the thing is not a play; it is not a bad play, 
it is a mass of clotted nonsense. One whole act 
describes the lovers going to look for a ring in a 
distant cave *when they both know they have 
dropped it down the well. Seen from some secret 
window on some special side of the soul's turret, 
this might convey a sense of faerie futility in our 
human life. But it is quite obvious that unless it 
called forth that one kind of sympathy, it would 
call forth nothing but laughter. In the same play, 
the husband chases his wife with a drawn sword, 
the wife remarking at intervals, 'I am not gay.' 
Now there may really be an idea in this; the idea 
of human misfortune coming most cruelly upon the 
opportunism of innocence ; that the lonely human 
heart says, like a child at a party, 'I am not en- 
joying myself as I thought I should.' But it is 

[16] 



Maurice Maeterlinck 

plain that unless one thinks of this idea, and of 
this idea only, the expression is not in the least 
unsuccessful pathos, — it is very broad and highly 
successful farce!" 

And so the atmosphere of Maeterlinck's plays 
is impregnated throughout with oppressive mys- 
teries, and until the key of these mysteries is found 
there is very little meaning to the plays. More- 
over, these mysteries, be they never so stern and 
awe-inspiring, are irresistibly alluring. The rea- 
son is, they are our own mysteries that have some- 
how escaped our grasp, and that we fain would 
recapture, because there dwells in every human 
breast a vague assent to the immortal truth of 
Goethe's assertion: "The thrill of awe is man's 
best heritage." * 

The imaginative equipment of Maeterlinck's 
dramaturgy is rather limited and, on its face value, 
trite. In particular are his dramatis personae 
creatures by no means calculated to overawe by 
some extraordinary weirdness or power. And yet 
we feel ourselves touched by an elemental dread 
and by an overwhelming sense of our human impo- 
tence in the presence of these figures who, without 
seeming supernatural, are certainly not of common 

l "Das Schaudern ist der Menschhe'it bestes Tell." 

[17] 



Prophets of Dissent 

flesh and blood; they impress us as surpassingly 
strange mainly because somehow they are instinct 
with a life fundamentally more real than the super- 
ficial reality we know. For they are the "mediums 
and oracles of the fateful powers that stir human 
beings into action. 

The poet of mysticism, then, delves into the 
mystic sources of our deeds, and makes us stand 
reverent with him before the unknowable forces 
by which we are controlled. Naturally he is 
obliged to shape his visions in dim outline. His 
aim is to shadow forth that which no naked eye 
can see, and it may be said in passing that he at- 
tains this aim with a mastery and completeness 
incomparably beyond the dubious skill displayed 
more recently by the grotesque gropings of the so- 
called futurist school. Perhaps one true secret of 
the perturbing strangeness of Maeterlinck's figures 
lies in the fact that the basic principle of their life, 
the one thoroughly vital element in them, if it does 
not sound too paradoxical to say so, is the idea of 
death. Maeterlinck's mood and temper are fully 
in keeping with the religious dogma that life is but 
a short dream — with Goethe he believes that "all 
things transitory but as symbols are sent," and 
apparently concurs in the creed voiced by one of 

[18] 



Maurice Maeterlinck 

Arthur Schnitzler's characters, — that death is the 
only subject in life worthy of being pondered by 
the serious mind. "From our death onwards," 
so he puts it somewhere, "the adventure of the 
universe becomes our own adventure." 



It will be useful to have a bit of personal infor- 
mation concerning our author. He started his 
active career as a barrister; not by any means aus- 
piciously, it seems, for already in his twenty- 
seventh year he laid the toga aside. Experience 
had convinced him that in the forum there were 
no laurels for him to pluck. The specific qualities 
that make for success at the bar were conspicu- 
ously lacking in his make-up. Far from being elo- 
quent, he has at all times been noted for an un- 
paralleled proficiency in the art of self-defensive 
silence. He shuns banal conversation and the 
sterile distractions of promiscuous social inter- 
course, dreads the hubbub of the city, and has an 
intense dislike for travel, to which he resorts only 
as a last means of escape from interviewers, re- 
porters, and admirers. Maeterlinck, it is seen, is 
anything but midtorum vir hominum. In order to 
preserve intact his love of humanity, he finds it 
expedient to live for the most part by himself, 

[19] 



Prophets of Dissent 

away from the throng "whose very plaudits give 
the heart a pang;" his fame has always been a 
source of annoyance to him. The only company 
he covets is that of the contemplative thinkers of 
bygone days, — the mystics, gnostics, cabalists, neo- 
Platonists. Swedenborg and Plotinus are perhaps 
his greatest favorites. That the war has pro- 
duced a mighty agitation in the habitual calm of 
the great Belgian poet-philosopher goes without 
saying. His love of justice no less than his love of 
his country aroused every red corpuscle in his 
virile personality to violent resentment against the 
invader. Since the war broke out, however, he 
has published nothing besides a number of ring- 
ingly eloquent and singularly pathetic articles and 
appeals, — so that the character portrait derived 
from the body of his work has not at this time 
lost its application to his personality. 

In cast of mind, Maeterlinck is sombrously 
meditative, and he has been wise in framing his 
outer existence so that it would accord with his 
habitual detachment. The greater part of his 
time used to be divided between his charming re- 
treat at Quatre Chemins, near Grasse, and the 
grand old abbey of St. Wandrille in Normandy, 
which he managed to snatch in the very nick of 

[20] 



Maurice Maeterlinck 

time from the tightening clutch of a manufacturing 
concern. With the temperament of a hermit, he 
has been, nevertheless, a keen observer of life, 
though one preferring to watch the motley spec- 
tacle from the aristocratic privacy of his box, 
sheltered, as it were, from prying curiosity. Well 
on in middle age, he is still an enthusiastic out-of- 
doors man, — gardener, naturalist, pedestrian, 
wheelman, and motorist, and commands an ex- 
traordinary amount of special knowledge in a va- 
riety of sports and sciences. In "The Double Gar- 
den" he discusses the automobile with the author- 
ity of an expert watt-man and mechanician. In 
one of his other books he evinces an extraordinary 
erudition in all matters pertaining to the higher 
education of dogs; and his work on "The Life of 
the Bee" passes him beyond question with high 
rank among "thirty-third degree" apiculturists. 

One of the characteristics that seem to separate 
his books, especially those of the earlier period, 
from the literary tendencies of his age, is their 
surprising inattention to present social struggles. 
His metaphysical bias makes him dwell almost ex- 
clusively, and with great moral and logical con- 
sistency, on aspects of life that are slightly con- 

[21] 



Prophets of Dissent 

sidered by the majority of men yet which he re- 
gards as ulteriorly of sole importance. 

When men like Maeterlinck are encountered in 
the world of practical affairs, they are bound to 
impress us as odd, because of this inversion of the 
ordinary policies of behavior. But before class- 
ing them as "cranks," we might well ask ourselves 
whether their appraisal of the component values 
of life does not, after all, correspond better to 
their true relativity than does our own habitual 
evaluation. With the average social being, the 
transcendental bearing of a proposition is synony- 
mous with its practical unimportance. But in his 
essay on "The Invisible Goodness" Maeterlinck 
quite properly raises the question : "Is visible life 
alone of consequence, and are we made up only of 
things that can be grasped and handled like peb- 
bles in the road?" 

Throughout his career Maeterlinck reveals him- 
self in the double aspect of poet and philosopher. 
In the first period his philosophy, as has already 
been amply hinted, is characterized chiefly by aver- 
sion from the externalities of life, and by that 
tense introversion of the mind which forms the 
mystic's main avenue to the goal of knowledge. 
But if, in order to find the key to his tragedies and 

[22] 



Maurice Maeterlinck 

puppet plays, we go to the thirteen essays repre- 
senting the earlier trend of his philosophy and is- 
sued in 1896 under the collective title, "The 
Treasure of the Humble," we discover easily that 
his cast of mysticism is very different from that of 
his philosophic predecessors and teachers in the 
fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, in particular 
from the devotional mysticism of the "Admirable" 
John Ruysbroeck, and Friedrich von Hardenberg- 
Novalis. Maeterlinck does not strive after the so- 
called "spiritual espousals," expounded by the 
"doctor ecstaticus," Ruysbroeck, in his celebrated 
treatise where Christ is symbolized as the divine 
groom and Human Nature as the bride glowing 
with desire for union with God. Maeterlinck 
feels too modernly to make use of that ancient 
sensuous imagery. The main thesis of his mysti- 
cal belief is that there are divine forces dormant 
in human nature; how to arouse and release them, 
constitutes the paramount problem of human life. 
His doctrine is that a life not thus energized by its 
own latent divineness is, and must remain, hum- 
drum and worthless. It will at once be noticed 
that such a doctrine harmonizes thoroughly with 
the romantic aspiration. Both mystic and ro- 
mantic teach that, in the last resort, the battlefield 

[23] 



Prophets of Dissent 

of our fate lies not out in the wide world but that 
it is enclosed in the inner self, within the unknown 
quantity which we designate as our soul. The visi- 
ble life, according to this modern prophet of mys- 
ticism, obeys the invisible ; happiness and unhappi- 
ness flow exclusively from the inner sources. 

Maeterlinck's speculations, despite their medie- 
val provenience, have a practical orientation. He 
firmly believes that it is within the ability of man- 
kind to raise some of the veils that cover life's cen- 
tral secret. In unison with some other charitable 
students of society, he holds to the faith that a 
more highly spiritualized era is dawning, and from 
the observed indications he prognosticates a wider 
awakening of the sleepbound soul of man. And 
certainly some of the social manifestations that 
appeared with cumulative force during the con- 
structive period before the war were calculated to 
justify that faith. The revival of interest in the 
metaphysical powers of man which expressed it- 
self almost epidemically through such widely di- 
vergent cults as Theosophy and Christian Science, 
was indubitable proof of spiritual yearnings in the 
broader masses of the people. And it had a prac- 
tical counterpart in civic tendencies and reforms 
that evidenced a great agitation of the social con- 

[24] 



Maurice Maeterlinck 

science. And even to-day, when the great major- 
ity feel that the universal embroilment has caused 
civilized man to fall from his laboriously achieved 
level, this sage in his lofty solitude feels the re- 
deeming spiritual connotation of our great calam- 
ity. "Humanity was ready to rise above itself, 
to surpass all that it had hitherto accomplished. 
It has surpassed it. . . . Never before had na- 
tions been seen that were able as a whole to under- 
stand that the happiness of each of those who live 
in this time of trial is of no consequence compared 
with the honor of those who live no more or the 
happiness of those who are not yet alive. We stand 
on heights that had not been attained before." 

But even for those many who find themselves 
unable to build very large hopes on the spiritual 
uplift of mankind through disaster, Maeter- 
linck's philosophy is a wholesome tonic. In the 
essay on "The Life Profound" in "The Treasure 
of the Humble," we are told: "Every man must 
find for himself in the low and unavoidable reality 
of common life his special possibility of a higher 
existence." The injunction, trite though it sound, 
articulates a moral very far from philistine. For 
it urges the pursuit of the transcendental self 
through those feelings which another very great 

[25] 



Prophets of Dissent 

idealist, Friedrich Schiller, describes in magnificent 
metaphor as 

. . . "der dunklen Gefiihle Gewalt, 
die im Herzen wunderbar schliefen." 

In the labyrinth of the subliminal consciousness 
there lurks, however, a great danger for the seek- 
er after the hidden treasures: the paralyzing ef- 
fect of fatalism upon the normal energies. Mae- 
terlinck was seriously threatened by this danger 
during his earlier period. How he eventually 
contrived his liberation from the clutch of fatal- 
ism is not made entirely clear by the progress of 
his thought. At all events, an era of greater in- 
tellectual freedom, which ultimately was to cre- 
ate him the undisputed captain of his soul and 
master of his fate, was soon to arrive for him. It 
is heralded by another book of essays : "Wisdom 
and Destiny." But, as has been stated, we may 
in his case hardly hope to trace the precise route 
traveled by the mind between the points of de- 
parture and arrival. 



So closely are the vital convictions in this truth- 
ful writer linked with the artistic traits of his work 
that without some grasp of his metaphysics even 
the technical peculiarities of his plays cannot be 

[26] 



Maurice Maeterlinck 

fully appreciated. To the mystic temper of mind, 
all life is secretly pregnant with great meaning, 
so that none of its phenomena can be deemed in- 
consequential. Thus, while Maeterlinck is a poet 
greatly preoccupied with spiritual matters yet 
nothing to him is more wonderful and worthy of 
attention than the bare facts and processes of 
living. Real life, just like the theatre which 
purports to represent it, manipulates a multiform 
assortment of stage effects, now coarse and obvi- 
ous and claptrap, now refined and esoteric, to suit 
the diversified taste and capacity of the patrons. 
To the cultured esthetic sense the tragical tendency 
carries more meaning than the catastrophic finale; 
our author accordingly scorns, and perhaps inordi- 
nately, whatsoever may appear as merely adventi- 
tious in the action of plays. "What can be told," 
he exclaims, "by beings who are possessed of a 
fixed idea and have no time to live because they 
have to kill off a rival or a mistress?" The inter- 
nalized action in his plays is all of one piece with 
the profound philosophical conviction that the 
inner life alone matters; that consequently the 
small and unnoticed events are more worthy of at- 
tention than the sensational, cataclysmic moments. 
"Why wait ye," he asks in that wonderful rhap- 

[27] 



Prophets of Dissent 

sody on "Silence" * "for Heaven to open at the 
strike of the thunderbolt? Ye should attend upon 
the blessed hours when it silently opens — and it is 
incessantly opening." 

His purpose, then, is to reveal the working of 
hidden forces in their intricate and inseparable 
connection with external events ; and in order that 
the vie interieure might have the right of way, 
drama in his practice emancipates itself very far 
from the traditional realistic methods. "Poetry," 
he maintains, "has no other purpose than to keep 
open the great roads that lead from the visible 
to the invisible." To be sure, this definition postu- 
lates, rather audaciously, a widespread spiritual 
susceptibility. But in Maeterlinck's optimistic 
anthropology no human being is spiritually so 
deadened as to be forever out of all communica- 
tion with the things that are divine and infinite. 
He fully realizes, withal, that for the great mass 
of men there exists no intellectual approach to 
the truly significant problems of life. It is rather 
through our emotional capacity that our spiritual 
experience brings us into touch with the final veri- 
ties. Anyway, the poet of mysticism appeals from 
the impasse of pure reasoning to the voice of the 

^The Treasure of the Humble." 

[28] 



Maurice Maeterlinck 

inner oracles. But how to detect in the deepest 
recesses of the soul the echoes of universal life 
and give outward resonance to their faint rever- 
berations? That is the artistic, and largely tech- 
nical, side of the problem. 

Obvious it is that if the beholder's collabora- 
tion in the difficult enterprise is to be secured, his 
imagination has to be stirred to a super-normal 
degree. Once a dramatist has succeeded in stimu- 
lating the imaginative activity, he can dispense 
with a mass of descriptive detail. But he must 
comply with two irremissible technical demands. 
In the first place, the "vie interieure" calls forth 
a dialogue interieur; an esoteric language, I would 
say, contrived predominantly for the "expres- 
sional" functions of speech, as differenced from its 
"impressional" purposes. Under Swedenborg's 
fanciful theory of "correspondences" the literal 
meaning of a word is merely a sort of protective 
husk for its secret spiritual kernel. It is this in- 
ner, essential meaning that Maeterlinck's dialogue 
attempts to set free. By a fairly simple and con- 
sistent code of intimations the underlying mean- 
ing of the colloquy is laid bare and a basis cre- 
ated for a more fundamental understanding of the 
dramatic transactions. Maeterlinck going, at first, 

[29] 



Prophets of Dissent 

to undue lengths in this endeavor, exposed the dic- 
tion of his dramas to much cheap ridicule. The 
extravagant use of repetition, in particular, made 
him a mark for facile burlesque. The words of 
the Queen in Princesse Maleine: "Mais ne repetez 
pas toujours ce que ton dit" were sarcastically 
turned against the poet himself. 

As a result of the extreme simplicity of his dia- 
logue, Maeterlinck was reproached with having 
invented the "monosyllabic theatre, " the "the- 
atre without words," and with having perpe- 
trated a surrogate sort of drama, a hybrid be- 
tween libretto and pantomime. 

The fact, however, is, his characters speak a 
language which, far from being absurd, as it was 
at first thought to be by many of hi& readers, is 
instinct with life and quite true to life — to life, 
that is, as made articulate in the intense privacy of 
dreams, or hallucinations, or moments of excessive 
emotional perturbation. 

The other principal requisite for the attainment 
of the inner dramatic vitalness in drama is a per- 
vasive atmospheric mood, a sustained Stimmung. 
This, in the case of Maeterlinck, is brought about 
by the combined employment of familiar and 
original artistic devices. 

[30] 



Maurice Maeterlinck 

The grave and melancholy mood that so deeply 
impregnates the work of Maeterlinck is tinged in 
the earlier stage, as has been pointed out, with the 
sombre coloring of fatalism. In the first few 
books, in particular, there hovers a brooding sense 
of terror and an undefinable feeling of desolation. 
Through Serres Chaudes ("Hot Houses"), his 
first published book, (1889), there runs a tenor 
of weariness, of ideal yearnings overshadowed by 
the hopelessness of circumstances. Even in this 
collection of poems, where so much less necessity 
exists for a unity of mood than in the plays, Mae- 
terlinck's predilection for scenic effects suggestive 
of weirdness and superstitious fear became appar- 
ent in the recurrent choice of sombre scenic motifs : 
oppressive nocturnal silence, — a stagnant sheet of 
water, — moonlight filtered through green win- 
dows, etc. The diction, too, through the inces- 
sant use of terms like morne, las, pale, desire, 
ennui, tiede, indolent, malade, exhales as it were a 
lazy resignation. Temporarily, then, the fatal- 
istic strain is uppermost both in the philosophy 
and the poetry of the rising young author; and 
to make matters worse, his is the fatalism of pessi- 
mistic despair: Fate is forsworn against man. 
The objective point of life is death. We con- 

[3i] 



Prophets of Dissent 

stantly receive warnings from within, but the 
voices are not unequivocal and emphatic enough to 
save us from ourselves. 

Probing the abysses of his subliminal self, the 
mystic may sense, along with the diviner prompt- 
ings of the heart, the lurking demons that under- 
mine happiness, — "the malignant powers," — again 
quoting Schiller — "whom no man's craft can make 
familiar" — that element in human nature which 
in truth makes man "his own worst enemy." It 
is a search which at this stage of his development 
Maeterlinck, as a mystic, cannot bring himself to 
relinquish, even though, pessimistically, he antici- 
pates that which he most dreads to find; in this 
way, fatalism and pessimism act as insuperable 
barriers against his artistic self-assertion. His 
fixed frame of mind confines him to the representa- 
tion of but one elemental instinct, namely, that of 
fear. The rustic in the German fairy tale who 
sallied forth to learn how to shudder, — gruseln, — 
would have mastered the art to his complete satis- 
faction if favored with a performance or two of 
such plays as "Princess Maleine," "The Intruder," 
or "The Sightless." Perhaps no other dramatist 
has ever commanded a similarly well-equipped ar- 
senal of thrills and terrible foreshadowings. The 

[32] 



Maurice Maeterlinck 

commonest objects are fraught with ominous fore- 
bodings : a white gown lying on a prie-dieu, a cur- 
tain suddenly set swaying by a puff of air, the mel- 
ancholy soughing of a clump of trees, — the sim- 
plest articles of daily use are converted into awful 
symbols that make us shiver by their whisperings 
of impending doom. 

Nor in the earlier products of Maeterlinck are 
the cruder practices of melodrama scorned or 
spared, — the crash and flash of thunder and light- 
ning, the clang of bells and clatter of chains, the 
livid light and ghastly shadows, the howling hurri- 
cane, the ominous croaking of ravens amid noctur- 
nal solitude, trees illumined by the fiery eyes of 
owls, bats w T hirring portentously through the 
gloom, — so many harbingers of dread and death. 
And the prophetic import of these tokens and their 
sort is reinforced by repeated assertions from the 
persons in the action that never before has any- 
thing like this been known to occur. To such a 
fearsome state are we wrought up by all this un- 
canny apparatus that at the critical moment a well 
calculated knock at the door is sufficient to make 
our flesh creep and our hair stand on end. 

Thus, the vie intericure would seem to prere- 
quire for its externalization a completely furnished 

[33] 



Prophets of Dissent 

chamber of horrors. And when it is added that 
the scene of the action is by preference a lonely 
churchyard or a haunted old mansion, a crypt, a 
cavern, a silent forest or a solitary tower, it is 
easy to understand why plays like "Princess Ma- 
leine" could be classed by superficial and unfriend- 
ly critics with the gruesome ebullitions of that 
fantastic quasi-literary occupation to which we 
owe a well known variety of "water-front" drama 
and, in fiction, the "shilling shocker/' Their im- 
measurably greater psychological refinement could 
not save them later on from condemnation at the 
hands of their own maker. And yet they are not 
without very great artistic merits. Octave Mir- 
beau, in his habitual enthusiasm for the out-of-the- 
ordinary, hailed Maeterlinck, on the strength of 
"Princess Maleine," as the Belgian Shakespeare, 
evidently because Maeterlinck derived some of his 
motifs from "Hamlet" : mainly the churchyard 
scene, and Prince Hjalmar's defiance of the queen, 
as well as his general want of decision. As a mat- 
ter of fact, Maeterlinck has profoundly studied, 
not Shakespeare alone, but the minor Elizabeth- 
ans as well. He has made an admirable transla- 
tion of "Macbeth." Early in his career he even 
translated one of John Ford's Plays, " 'Tis Pity 

[34] 



Maurice Maeterlinck 

She's a Whore," one of the coarsest works ever 
written for the stage, but to which he was attract- 
ed by the intrinsic human interest that far out- 
weighs its offensiveness. As for any real kinship 
of Maeterlinck with Shakespeare, the resemblance 
between the two is slight. They differ philosophic- 
ally in the fundamental frame of mind, ethically 
in the outlook upon life, dramaturgically in the 
value attached to external action, and humanly, — 
much to the disadvantage of the Belgian, — in their 
sense of humor. For unfortunately it has to be 
confessed that this supreme gift of the gods has 
been very sparingly dispensed to Maeterlinck. Al- 
together, whether or no he is to be counted among 
the disciples of Shakespeare, his works show no 
great dependence on the master. With far better 
reason might he be called a debtor to Germanic 
folklore, especially in its fantastic elements. 

A German fairy world it is to which we are 
transported by Maeterlinck's first dramatic at- 
tempt, "Princess Maleine," (1889), a play re- 
fashioned after Grimm's tale of the Maid Maleen; 
only that in the play all the principals come to a 
harrowing end and that in it an esoteric meaning 
lies concealed underneath the primitive plot. The 
action, symbolically interpreted, illustrates the fa- 

[35] 



Prophets of Dissent 

talist's doctrine that man is nothing but a toy in 
the hands of dark and dangerous powers. Prac- 
tical wisdom does not help us to discern the work- 
ing of these powers until it is too late. Neither 
can we divine their presence, for the prophetic ap- 
prehension of the future resides not in the expert 
and proficient, but rather in the helpless or de- 
crepit, — the blind, the feeble-minded, and the 
stricken in years, or again in young children and in 
dumb animals. Take the scene in "Princess Ma- 
leine" where the murderers, having invaded the 
chamber, lie there in wait, with bated breath. In 
the corridor outside, people are unconcernedly 
passing to and fro, while the only creatures who, 
intuitively, sense the danger, are the little Prince 
and a dog that keeps anxiously scraping at the 
door. 

InUIntruse ("The Intruder"), (1890), a one- 
act play on a theme which is collaterally developed 
later on in Les Aveugles ("The Sightless"), and 
in Ulnterieur ("Home"), the arriving disaster 
that cannot be shut out by bolts or bars announces 
itself only to the clairvoyant sense of a blind old 
man. The household gathered around the table is 
placidly waiting for the doctor. Only the blind 
grandfather is anxious and heavy-laden because he 

[36] 



Maurice Maeterlinck 

alone knows that Death is entering the house, he 
alone can feel his daughter's life withering away 
under the breath of the King of Terror: the sight- 
less have a keener sensitiveness than the seeing 
for what is screened from the physical eye. 

It would hardly be possible to name within the 
whole range of dramatic literature another work 
so thoroughly pervaded with the chilling horror 
of approaching calamity. The talk at the table is 
of the most commonplace, — that the door will not 
shut properly, and they must send for the car- 
penter to-morrow. But from the mechanism of 
the environment there comes cumulative and incre- 
mental warning that something extraordinary and 
fatal is about to happen. The wind rises, the 
trees shiver, the nightingales break off their sing- 
ing, the fishes in the pond grow restive, the dogs 
cower in fear, — an unseen Presence walks through 
the garden. Then the clanging of a scythe is 
heard. A cold current of air rushes into the room. 
Nearer and nearer come the steps. The grand- 
father insists that a stranger has seated himself 
in the midst of the family. The lamp goes out. 
The bell strikes midnight. The old man is sure 
that somebody is rising from the table. Then 
suddenly the baby whose voice has never been 

[37] 



Prophets of Dissent 

heard starts crying. Through an inner door steps 
a deaconess silently crossing herself: the mother 
of the house is dead. 

These incidents in themselves are not neces- 
sarily miraculous. There are none of them but 
might be accounted for on perfectly natural 
grounds. In fact, very plausible explanations do 
offer themselves for the weirdest things that come 
to pass. So, especially, it was a real, ordinary 
mower that chanced to whet his scythe; yet the 
apparition of the Old Reaper in person could not 
cause the chilling consternation produced by this 
trivial circumstance coming as it does as the climax 
of a succession of commonplace happenings ex- 
aggerated and distorted by a fear-haunted im- 
agination. To produce an effect like that upon 
an audience whose credulity refuses to be put to 
any undue strain is a victorious proof of prime 
artistic ability. 

Les Aveugles ("The Sightless"), (1891), is 
pitched in the same psychological key. The atmos- 
phere is surcharged with unearthly apprehen- 
sion. A dreary twilight — in the midst of a 
thick forest — on a lonely island; twelve blind 
people fretting about the absence of their guar- 
dian. He is gone to find a way out of the 

[38] 



Maurice Maeterlinck 

woods — what can have become of him? From 
moment to moment the deserted, helpless band 
grows more fearstricken. The slightest sound be- 
comes the carrier of evil forebodings: the rus- 
tling of the foliage, the flapping of a bird's wings, 
the swelling roar of the nearby sea in its dash 
against the shore. The bell strikes twelve — they 
wonder is it noon or night? Then questions, eager 
and calamitous, pass in whispers among them : 
Has the leader lost his way? Will he never come 
back? Has the dam burst apart and will they all 
be swallowed by the ocean? The pathos is greatly 
heightened by an extremely delicate yet sure indi- 
viduation of the figures, as when at the mention of 
Heaven those not sightless from birth raise their 
countenance to the sky. And where in the mean- 
while is the lost leader ? He is seated right in their 
midst, but smitten by death. They learn it at last 
through the actions of the dog; besides whom — in 
striking parallel to "Princess Maleine" — the only 
other creature able to see is a little child. The hor- 
ror-stricken unfortunates realize that they can 
never get home, and that they must perish in the 
woods. 

In Les Sept Princesses ("The Seven Prin- 
cesses"), ( 1 89 1 ) , although it is one of Maeter- 

[39] 



Prophets of Dissent 

linck's minor achievements, some of the qualities 
that are common to all his work become peculiarly 
manifest. This is particularly true of the skill 
shown in conveying the feeling of the story by 
means of suitable scenic devices. Most of his 
plays depend to a considerable degree for their 
dark and heavy nimbus of unreality upon a studied 
combination of paraphernalia in themselves 
neither numerous nor far-sought. In fact, the re- 
sulting scenic repertory, too, is markedly limited: 
a weird forest, a deserted castle with marble stair- 
case and dreamy moonlit terrace, a tower with 
vaulted dungeons, a dismal corridor flanked by im- 
penetrable chambers, a lighted interior viewed 
from the garden, a landscape bodefully creped 
with twilight — the list nearly exhausts his store 
of "sets." 

The works mentioned so far are hardly more 
than able exercises preparatory for the ampler 
and more finished products which were to succeed 
them. Yet they represent signal steps in the evo- 
lution of a new dramatic style, designed, as has 
already been intimated, to give palpable form to 
emotional data descried in moments anterior not 
only to articulation but even to consciousness it- 
self; and for this reason, the plane of the dramatic 

[40] 



Maurice Maeterlinck 

action lies deep below the surface of life, down in 
the inner tabernacle where the mystic looks for the 
hidden destinies. In his style, Maeterlinck had 
gradually developed an unprecedented capacity for 
bringing to light the secret agencies of fate. A 
portion of the instructed public had already 
learned to listen in his writings for the finer re- 
verberations that swing in the wake of the uttered 
phrase, to heed the slightest hints and allusions in 
the text, to overlook no glance or gesture that 
might betray the mind of the acting characters. 
It is true that art to be great must be plain, but 
that does not mean that the sole test of great art 
is the response of the simple and apathetic. 

In Maeterlinck's first masterpiece, Pelleas et 
Melisande, (1892), the motives again are drawn 
up from the lower regions of consciousness; once 
more the plot is born of a gloomy fancy, and the 
darkling mood hovering over scene and action 
attests the persistence of fatalism in the poet. The 
theory of old King Arkel, the spokesman of the 
author's personal philosophy, is that one should 
not seek to be active; one should ever wait on 
the threshold of Fate. Even the younger people 
in the play are infected by the morbid doctrine of 
an inevitable necessity for all things that happen 

[41] 



Prophets of Dissent 

to them: "We do not go where we would go. 
We do not do that which we would do." Perhaps, 
however, these beliefs are here enounced for the 
last time with the author's assent or acquiescence. 
In artistic merit "Pelleas and Melisande" marks 
a nearer approach to mastery, once the integral 
peculiarities of the form and method have been 
granted. Despite a noticeable lack of force, di- 
rectness, and plasticity in the characterization, the 
vie interieure is most convincingly expressed. In 
one of the finest scenes of the play we see the prin- 
cipals at night gazing out upon a measureless ex- 
panse of water dotted with scattered lights. The 
atmosphere is permeated with a reticent yearning 
of love. The two young creatures, gentle, shy, 
their souls tinged with melancholy, are drawn to- 
wards one another by an ineluctable mutual at- 
traction. Yet, though their hearts are filled to 
overflowing, not a word of affection is uttered. 
Their love reveals itself to us even as to them- 
selves, without a loud and jarring declaration, 
through its very speechlessness, as it were. The 
situation well bears out the roi sage in Alladine 
et Palomides: "There is a moment when souls 
touch one another and know everything without 
a need of our opening the lips." There are still 

[42] 



Maurice Maeterlinck 

other scenes in this play so tense with emotion that 
words would be intrusive and dissonant. There is 
that lovely picture of Melisande at the window; 
Pelleas cannot reach up to her hand, but is satis- 
fied to feel her loosened hair about his face. It 
is a question whether even that immortal love duet 
in "Romeo and Juliet" casts a poetic spell more 
enchanting than this. At another moment in the 
drama, we behold the lovers in Maeterlinck's be- 
loved half-light, softly weeping as they stare with 
speechless rapture into the flames. And not until 
the final parting does any word of love pass their 
lips. In another part of the play Goland, Meli- 
sande's aging husband, who suspects his young 
stepbrother, Pelleas, of loving Melisande, con- 
ducts him to an underground chamber. We are 
not told why he has brought him there, and why 
he has led him to the brink of the pitfall from 
which there mounts a smell of death. If it be a 
heinous deed he is brooding, why does he pause in 
its execution? His terrible struggle does not reveal 
itself through speech, yet it is eloquently expressed 
in the wildness of his looks, the trembling of his 
voice, and the sudden anguished outcry : "Pelleas ! 
Pelleas!" 

Evidently Maeterlinck completely achieves the 

[43] 



Prophets of Dissent 

very purpose to which the so-called Futurists think 
they must sacrifice all traditional conceptions of 
Art; and achieves it without any brutal stripping 
and skinning of the poetic subject, without the 
hideous exhibition of its disjecta membra, and 
above all, without that implied disqualification for 
the higher artistic mission which alone could induce 
a man to limit his service to the dishing-up of 
chunks and collops, "cubic" or amorphous. 

In recognition of a certain tendency towards 
mannerism that lay in his technique, Maeterlinck, 
in a spirit of self-persiflage, labeled the book of 
one-act plays which he next published, (1894), 
Trots Petits Drames pour Marionettes ("Three 
Little Puppet Plays") . They are entitled, several- 
ly: Alladine et Palomides, Interieur, and La 
Mort de Tintagiles. While in motifs and ma- 
terials as well as in the principal points of style 
these playlets present a sort of epitome of his ar- 
tistic progression up to date, they also display some 
new and significant qualities. Of the three the 
first named is most replete with suggestive sym- 
bolism and at the same time most remindful of 
the older plays, especially of "Pelleas and Meli- 
sande." King Ablamore is in character and de- 
meanor clearly a counterpart of King Arkel. To 

[44] 



Maurice Maeterlinck 

be sure he makes a temporary stand against the 
might of Fate, but his resistance is meek and fu- 
tile, and his wisdom culminates in the same old 
fatalistic formula : "Je sais qu'on ne fait pas ce 
que Von voudrait faire" 

Ulnterieur ("Home") handles a theme almost 
identical with that of L'Intruse: Life and Death 
separated only by a thin pane of glass, — the sud- 
den advent of affliction from a cloudless sky. In 
this little tragedy a family scene, enacted in "dumb 
show," is watched from the outside. The play is 
without suspense in the customary use of the term, 
since after the first whispered conversation be- 
tween the bringers of the fateful tidings the au- 
dience is fully aware of the whole story: — the 
daughter of the house, for whose return the little 
group is waiting, has been found dead in the river. 
The quiescent mood is sustained to the end; no 
great outburst of lamentation; the curtain drops 
the instant the news has been conveyed. But the 
poignancy of the tragic strain is only enhanced 
by the repression of an exciting climax. 

"The Death of Tintagiles" repeats in a still 
more harrowing form the fearful predicament of 
a helpless child treated with so much dramatic 
tension in Maeterlinck's first tragedy. Again, as 

[45] 



Prophets of Dissent 

in "Princess Maleine," the action of this dramo- 
let attains its high point in a scene where mur- 
derous treachery is about to spring the trap set for 
an innocent young prince. Intuitively he senses 
the approach of death, and in vain beats his lit- 
tle fists against the door that imprisons him. The 
situation is rendered more piteous even than in 
the earlier treatment of the motif, because the 
door which bars his escape also prevents his faith- 
ful sister Ygraine from coming to the rescue. 

We have observed in all the plays so far a 
marked simplicity of construction. Aglavaine et 
Selysette, (1896), denotes a still further simplifica- 
tion. Here the scenic apparatus is reduced to the 
very minimum, and the psychological premises are 
correspondingly plain. The story presents a "tri- 
angular" love entanglement strangely free from 
the sensual ingredient ; two women dream of shar- 
ing, in all purity, one lover — and the dream ends 
for one of them in heroic self-sacrifice brought to 
secure the happiness of the rival. However, more 
noteworthy than the structure of the plot is the 
fact that the philosophic current flowing through it 
has perceptibly altered its habitual direction. The 
spiritual tendency is felt to be turning in its course, 
and even though fatalism still holds the rule, with 

[46] 



Maurice Maeterlinck 

slowly relaxing grip, yet a changed ethical out- 
look is manifest. Also, this play for the first time 
proclaims, though in no vociferous manner, the 
duty of the individual toward himself, the duty so 
emphatically proclaimed by two of Maeterlinck's 
greatest teachers, Ralph Waldo Emerson and 
Henrik Ibsen. 



The inner philosophic conflict was but of short 
duration. In 1898 La Sagesse et La Destinee 
("Wisdom and Destiny") saw the light. The 
metaphor might be taken in a meaning higher and 
more precise than the customary, for, coming to 
this book from those that preceded is indeed like 
emerging from some dark and dismal cave into 
the warm and cheering light of the sun. "Wisdom 
and Destiny" is a collection of essays and aphor- 
isms which stands to this second phase of Maeter- 
linck's dramaturgy in a relation closely analogous 
to that existing between "The Treasure of the 
Humble" and the works heretofore surveyed. 
Without amounting to a wholesale recantation of 
the idea that is central in the earlier set of essays, 
the message of the newer set is of a very different 
kind. The author of "Wisdom and Destiny" has 
not changed his view touching the superiority of 

[47] 



Prophets of Dissent 

the intuitional function over the intellectual. The 
significant difference between the old belief and 
the new consists simply in this : the latent force of 
life is no longer imagined as an antagonistic 
agency; rather it is conceived as a benign energy 
that makes for a serene acceptance of the world 
that is. Of this turn in the outlook, the philo- 
sophic affirmation of life and the consent of the 
will to subserve the business of living are the salu- 
tary concomitants. Wisdom, in expanding, has 
burst the prison of fatalism and given freedom to 
vision. The world, beheld in the light of this 
emancipation, is not to be shunned by the wise 
man. Let Fortune bring what she will, he can 
strip his afflictions of their terrors by transmuting 
them into higher knowledge. Therefore, pain 
and suffering need not be feared and shirked; they 
may even be hailed with satisfaction, for, as is 
paradoxically suggested in Aglavaine et Selysette, 
they help man "etre heureux en devenant plus 
triste" — to be happy in becoming sadder. The 
poet, who till now had clung to the conviction that 
there can be no happy fate, that all our destinies 
are guided by unlucky stars, now on the contrary 
persuades us to consider how even calamity may 
be refined in the medium of wisdom in such fash- 

[48] 



Maurice Maeterlinck 

ion as to become an asset of life, and warns us 
against recoiling in spirit from any reverse of 
our fortunes. He holds that blows and sorrows 
cannot undo the sage. Fate has no weapons save 
those we supply, and "wise is he for whom even 
the evil must feed the pyre of love." In fine, Fate 
obeys him who dares to command it. After all, 
then, man has a right to appoint himself the cap- 
tain of his soul, the master of his fate. 

Yet, for all that, the author of "Wisdom and 
Destiny" should not be regarded as the partizan 
and apologist of sadness for the sake of wisdom. 
If sorrow be a rich mine of satisfaction, joy is by 
far the richer mine. This new outlook becomes 
more and more optimistic because of the increas- 
ing faculty of such a philosophy to extract from 
the mixed offerings of life a more near-at-hand 
happiness than sufferings can possibly afford; not 
perchance that perpetual grinning merriment over 
the comicality of the passing spectacle which with 
so many passes for a "sense of humor," but rather 
a calm and serious realization of what is lastingly 
beautiful, good, and true. A person's attainment 
of this beatitude imposes on him the clear duty of 
helping others to rise to a similar exalted level of 
existence. And this duty Maeterlinck seeks to dis- 

[49] 



Prophets of Dissent 

charge by proclaiming in jubilant accents the con- 
crete reality of happiness. L'Oiseau Bleu ("The 
Blue Bird"), above all other works, illustrates the 
fact that human lives suffer not so much for the 
lack of happiness as for the want of being clearly 
conscious of the happiness they possess. It is seen 
that the seed of optimism in "The Treasure of 
the Humble" has sprouted and spread out, and at 
last triumphantly shot forth through the overlay- 
ing fatalism. The newly converted, hence all the 
more thoroughgoing, optimist, believing that coun- 
sel and consolation can come only from those who 
trust in the regenerative power of hope, throws 
himself into a mental attitude akin to that of the 
Christian Scientist, and confidently proceeds to 
cure the ills of human kind by a categorical denial 
of their existence. Or perhaps it would be more 
just to say of Maeterlinck's latter-day outlook, the 
serenity of which even the frightful experience of 
the present time has failed to destroy, that instead 
of peremptorily negating evil, he merely de- 
nies its supremacy. All about him he perceives in 
the midst of the worst wrongs and evils many 
fertile germs of righteousness; vice itself seems to 
distil its own antitoxin. 

Together with Maeterlinck's optimistic strain, 
[50] 



Maurice Maeterlinck 

his individualism gains an unexpected emphasis. 
u Before one exists for others, one must exist for 
one's self. The egoism of a strong and clear- 
sighted soul is of a more beneficent effect than all 
the devotion of a blind and feeble soul." Here we 
have a promulgation identical in gist with Emer- 
son's unqualified declaration of moral independ- 
ence when he says : "Whoso would be a man must 
be a nonconformist. He who would gather im- 
mortal palms must not be hindered by the name of 
goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. 
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your 
own mind. No law can be sacred to me but that 
of my nature." 1 

His attitude of countenancing the positive joys 
of living causes Maeterlinck in his later career to 
reverse his former judgment, and to inveigh, much 
in the manner of Nietzsche, against the "parasiti- 
cal virtues." "Certain notions about resignation 
and self-sacrifice sap the finest moral forces of 
mankind more thoroughly than do great vices and 
even crimes. The alleged triumphs over the flesh 
are in most cases only complete defeats of life." 
When to such rebellious sentiments is joined an ex- 
plicit warning against the seductions and intimida- 

1 "Self-Reliance." 

[51] 



Prophets of Dissent 

tions held out by the official religions — their sugar 
plums and dog whips, as Maeterlinck puts it — one 
can only wonder how his writings escaped as long 
as they did the attention of the authorities that 
swing the power of imprimatur and anathema. 

Maeterlinck may not be classed unreservedly 
as a radical individualist. For whereas a philoso- 
phy like that of Nietzsche takes no account of the 
"much-too-many," who according to that great 
fantasist do not interest anybody except the stat- 
istician and the devil, Maeterlinck realizes the 
supreme importance of the great mass as the or- 
dained transmitters of civilization. The gulf be- 
tween aristocratic subjectivism, devoted single- 
mindedly to the ruthless enforcement of self-in- 
terest, and, on the other hand, a self-forgetful so- 
cial enthusiasm, is bridged in Maeterlinck by an 
extremely strong instinct for justice and, more- 
over, by his firm belief — at least for the time being 
— that the same strong instinct exists universally 
as a specific trait of human nature. By such a 
philosophy Justice, then, is discerned not as a 
supra-natural function, but as a function of human 
nature as distinguished from nature at large. The 
restriction is made necessary by our knowledge of 
the observable operations of nature. In particular 

[52] 



Maurice Maeterlinck 

would the principle of heredity seem to argue 
against the reign of justice in the administration 
of human destinies, inasmuch as we find ourselves 
quite unable to recognize in the apportionment of 
pleasure and pain anything like a due ratio of 
merit. And yet Maeterlinck realizes that per- 
haps nature measures life with a larger standard 
than the individual's short span of existence, and 
warns us in his essay on "Justice" not to indulge 
our self-conceit in a specious emulation of ways 
that are utterly beyond our comprehension. After 
all, then, our poet-philosopher succeeds foro con- 
scientia in reconciling his cult of self with devo- 
tion to the common interest. Morality, in that 
essay, is defined as the co-ordination of personal 
desire to the task assigned by nature to the race. 
And is it not true that a contrary, that is, ascetic 
concept of morality reduces itself to absurdity 
through its antagonism to that primal human in- 
stinct that makes for the continuity of life? 



From the compromise effected between two 
fairly opposite ethical principles, there emerges 
in the works of this period something akin to a 
socialistic tendency. It is organically related to 
the mystical prepossession of the author's manner 

[S3] 



Prophets of Dissent 

of thinking, Maeterlinck gratefully acknowledges 
that by the search-light of science the uppermost 
layers of darkness have been dispelled; but real- 
izes also that the deep-seated central enigma still 
remains in darkness : as much as ever are the pri- 
mordial causes sealed against a glimpse of finite 
knowledge. We have changed the names, not the 
problems. Instead of God, Providence, or Fate, 
we say Nature, Selection, and Heredity. But in 
reality do we know more concerning Life than did 
our ancestors? 

What, then, questions the persevering pursuer 
of the final verities, shall we do in order that we 
may press nearer to Truth? May we not per- 
chance steep our souls in light that flows from 
another source than science? And what purer 
light is there to illumine us than the halo sur- 
rounding a contented worker performing his task, 
not under coercion, but from a voluntary, or it 
may be instinctive, submission to the law of life? 
If such subordination of self constitutes the basis 
of rational living, we shall do well to study its 
workings on a lowlier and less complicated plane 
than the human; for instance, in the behavior of 
the creature that is proverbial for its unflagging 
industry. For this industry is not motivated by 

[54] 



Maurice Maeterlinck 

immediate or selfish wants; it springs from in- 
stinctive self-dedication to the common cause. 
Some people expected from La Vie des Abeilles 
("The Life of the Bee"), (1901), much brand- 
new information about matters of apiculture. But 
in spite of his twenty-five years' experience, Mae- 
terlinck had no startling discoveries to convey to 
his fellow-hivers. His book on bees is not pri- 
marily the result of a specialist's investigations but 
a poetical record of the observations made by a 
mind at once romantic and philosophical and 
strongly attracted to the study of this particular 
form of community life, because by its organiza- 
tion on a miniature scale it spreads before the 
student of society a synoptic view of human af- 
fairs. 

Of the great chanee that had by now taken 
place in his conception of life, Maeterlinck was 
fully cognizant, and made no concealment of it. 
In the essay on "Justice" he says, with reference 
to his earlier dramas: "The motive of these little 
plays was the fear of the Unknown by which we 
are constantly surrounded," and passes on to de- 
scribe his religious temper as a sort of compound 
of the Christian idea of God with the antique idea 
of Fate, immersed in the profound gloom of hope- 

[55] 



Prophets of Dissent 

less mystery. "The Unknown took chiefly the 
aspect of a power, itself but blindly groping in 
the dark, yet disposing with inexorable unfeeling- 
ness of the fates of men." 

Evidently those same plays are passed once 
more in self-critical review in Ardiane et Barbe- 
Bleue ("Ardiane and Blue-Beard"), (1899), not " 
withstanding the fact that the author disclaims 
any philosophic purpose and presents his work as 
a mere libretto. We cannot regard it as purely 
accidental that of Blue-Beard's terror-stricken 
wives, four, — Selysette, Melisande, Ygraine, Al- 
ladine, — bear the names of earlier heroines, and, 
besides, that each of these retains with the name 
also the character of her namesake. The symbol- 
ism is too transparent. The child-wives of the cruel 
knight, forever in a state of trembling fear, are 
too passive to extricate themselves from their fate, 
whereas Ardiane succeeds instantly in breaking 
her captivity, because she has the spirit and 
strength to shatter the window and let in the light 
and air. The contrast between her resolute per- 
sonality and those five inert bundles of misery un- 
doubtedly connotes the difference between the au- 
thor's paralyzing fatalism in the past and his pres- 
ent dynamic optimism. 

[56] 



Maurice Maeterlinck 

A like contrast between dejection and resilience 
would be brought to light by a comparison of the 
twelve lyric poems, Douze Chansons, (1897), 
with the Serves Chaudes. The mood is still great- 
ly subdued; the new poetry is by no means free 
from sadness and a strain of resignation. But the 
half-stifled despair that cries out from the older 
book returns no dissonant echo in the new. 

Even his dramatic technique comes under the 
sway of Maeterlinck's altered view of the world. 
The far freer use of exciting and eventful action 
testifies to increased elasticity and force. This is 
a marked feature of Sosur Beatrice ("Sister 
Beatrice"), (1900), a miracle play founded on 
the old story about the recreant nun who, broken 
from sin and misery, returns to the cloister and 
finds that during the many years of her absence 
her part and person have been carried out by 
the Holy Virgin herself. 

Equally, the three other dramas of this epoch — 
Aglavaine et Selysette, Monna Fanna, and Joy- 
zelle — are highly available for scenic enactment. 
Of the three, Monna Vanna, (1902), in particu- 
lar is conspicuous for a wholly unexpected apti- 
tude of characterization, and for the unsurpassed 
intensity of its situations, which in this isolated 

[57] 



Prophets of Dissent 

case are not cast in a single mood as in the other 
plays, but are individually distinct and full of 
dramatic progress, whereas everywhere else the 
action moves rather sluggishly. 

"Monna Vanna" is one of the most brilliantly 
actable plays of modern times, despite its im- 
probability. A certain incongruity between the 
realistic and the romantic aspects in the behavior 
of the principals is saved from offensiveness by 
a disposition on the part of the spectator to refer 
it, unhistorically, to the provenience of the story. 
But as a matter of fact the actors are not fifteenth 
century Renaissance men and women at all, but 
mystics, modern mystics at that, both in their rea- 
soning and their morality. It is under a cryptical 
soul-compulsion that Giovanna goes forth to the 
unknown condottiere prepared to lay down her 
honor for the salvation of her people, and that 
her husband at last conquers his repugnance to her 
going. Prinzivalle, Guido, Marco, are mystics 
even to a higher degree than Vanna. 

The poignant actualism of "Monna Vanna" 
lies, however, in the author's frank sympathy with 
a distinctively modern zest for freedom. The 
situation between husband and wife is reminiscent 
of "A Doll's House" in the greedily possessive 

[58] 



Maurice Maeterlinck 

quality of Guido's affection, with which quality 
his tyrannous unbelief in Prinzivalle's magna- 
nimity fully accords. But Maeterlinck here goes 
a step beyond Ibsen. In her married life with 
Guido, Vanna was meekly contented, "at least as 
happy as one can be when one has renounced the 
vague and extravagant dreams which seem be- 
yond human life." When the crisis arrives she 
realizes that "it is never too late for one who has 
found a love that can fill a life." Her final re- 
bellion is sanctioned by the author, who unmis- 
takably endorses the venerable Marco's profes- 
sion of faith that life is always in the right. 

"Joyzelle," (1903), inferior to "Monna Van- 
na" dramaturgically, and in form the most dis- 
tinctly fantastic of all Maeterlinck's productions, 
is still farther removed from the fatalistic atmos- 
phere. This play sounds, as the author himself 
has stated, "the triumph of will and love over 
destiny or fatality," as against the converse les- 
son of Monna Vanna. The idea is symbolically 
expressed in the temptations of Lanceor and in 
the liberation of Joyzelle and her lover from the 
power of Merlin and his familiar, Arielle, who 
impersonates the secret forces of the heart. 

Aglavaine et Selysette, Monna Vanna, and 

[59] 



Prophets of Dissent 

Joyzelle mark by still another sign the advent of 
a new phase in Maeterlinck's evolution; namely, 
by the characterization of the heroines. Pre- 
viously, the women in his plays were hardly in- 
dividualized and none of them can be said to 
possess a physiognomy strictly her own. Mae- 
terlinck had returned with great partiality again 
and again to the same type of woman: languid and 
listless, without stamina and strength, yet at the 
same time full of deep feeling, and capable of 
unending devotion — pathetic incorporeal figures 
feeling their way along without the light of self- 
consciousness, like some pre-raphaelite species of 
somnambulists. In the new plays, on the con- 
trary, women of a courageous and venturesome 
spirit and with a self-possessive assurance are por- 
trayed by preference and with unmistakable ap- 
proval. 

As the technique in the more recent creations 
of Maeterlinck, so the diction, too, accommodates 
itself to altered tendencies. Whereas formerly 
the colloquy was abrupt and fragmentary, it is 
now couched in cadenced, flowing language, which, 
nevertheless, preserves the old-time simplicity. 
The poet himself has criticized his former dia- 
logue. He said it made those figures seem like 

[60] ; 



Maurice Maeterlinck 

deaf people walking in their sleep, whom some- 
body is endeavoring to arouse from a heavy 
dream. 

For the limited purpose of this sketch it is not 
needful to enter into a detailed discussion of Mae- 
terlinck's latest productions, since such lines as 
they add to his philosophical and artistic physiog- 
nomy have been traced beforehand. His literary 
output for the last dozen years or so is embodied 
in six or seven volumes : about two years to a 
book seems to be his normal ratio of achieve- 
ment, the same as was so regularly observed by 
Henrik Ibsen, and one that seems rather suitable 
for an author whose reserve, dictated by a pro- 
found artistic and moral conscience, like his ac- 
tual performance, calls for admiration and grati- 
tude. During the war he has written, or at least 
published, very little. It is fairly safe to assume 
that the emotional experience of this harrowing 
period will control his future philosophy as its 
most potent factor; equally safe is it to predict, 
on the strength of his published utterances, that 
his comprehensive humanity, that has been put 
to such a severe test, will pass unscathed through 
the ordeal. 

[61] 



Prophets of Dissent 

Of the last group of Maeterlinck's works only 
two are dramas, namely, "The Blue Bird," 
(1909), and "Mary Magdalene," (1910). The 
baffling symbolism of "The Blue Bird"- has not 
stood in the way of a tremendous international 
stage success; the fact is due much less to the 
simple line of thought that runs through the 
puzzle than to the exuberant fancy that gave rise 
to it and its splendid scenical elaboration. Prob- 
ably Mr. Henry Rose is right, in his helpful analy- 
sis of "The Blue Bird," in venturing the asser- 
tion that "by those who are familiar with Sweden- 
borg's teaching 'The Blue Bird' must be recog- 
nized as to a very large extent written on lines 
which are in accordance with what is known as 
the Science of Correspondences — a very important 
part of Swedenborg's teachings." But the under- 
standing of this symbolism in its fullness offers 
very great difficulties. That a definite and con- 
sistent meaning underlies all its features will be 
rather felt than comprehended by the great ma- 
jority who surely cannot be expected to go to the 
trouble first of familiarizing themselves with Mae- 
terlinck's alleged code of symbols and then of 
applying it meticulously to the interpretation of 
his plays. 

[62] 



Maurice Maeterlinck 

"Mary Magdalene, " judged from the dramatic 
point of view, is a quite impressive tragedy, yet 
a full and sufficient treatment of the very sugges- 
tive scriptural legend it is not. The converted 
courtezan is characterized too abstractly. Instead 
of presenting herself as a woman consumed with 
blazing sensuality but in whom the erotic fire is 
transmuted into religious passion, she affects us 
like an enacted commentary upon such a most 
extraordinary experience. 

Finally, there are several volumes of essays, to 
some of which reference has already been made. 1 
Le Temple Enseveli ("The Buried Temple"), 
(1902), consists of six disquisitions, all dealing 
with metaphysical subjects: Justice, The Evolu- 
tion of Mystery, The Reign of Matter, The Past, 
Chance, The Future. Le Double Jar din ("The 
Double Garden"), (1904), is much more miscel- 
laneous in its makeup. These are its heterogene- 
ous subjects : The Death of a Little Dog, Monte 
Carlo, A Ride in a Motor Car, Dueling, The 

1 Considerable liberty has been taken by Maeterlinck in the 
grouping and naming of his essays upon their republication in 
the several collections. The confusion caused thereby is greatly 
increased by the deviation of some of the translated editions 
from the original volumes as to the sequence of articles, the 
individual and collective titles, and even the contents themselves. 

[63] 



Prophets of Dissent 

Angry Temper of the Bees, Universal Suffrage, 
The Modern Drama, The Sources of Spring, 
Death and the Crown (a discussion upon the fa- 
tal illness of Edward VII) , a View of Rome, Field 
Flowers, Chrysanthemums, Old-fashioned Flow- 
ers, Sincerity, The Portrait of Woman, and Olive 
Branches (a survey of certain now, alas, obsolete 
ethical movements of that day) . U Intelligence 
des Fleurs (in the translation it is named "Life 
and Flowers," in an enlarged issue "The Measure 
of the Hours," both 1907), takes up, besides the 
theme of the general caption, the manufacture of 
perfumes, the various instruments for measuring 
time, the psychology of accident, social duty, war, 
prize-fighting, and "King Lear." In 19 12, three 
essays on Emerson, Novalis, and Ruysbroeck ap- 
peared collectively, in English, under the title "On 
Emerson and Other Essays." These originally 
prefaced certain works of those writers translated 
by Maeterlinck in his earlier years. 

Maeterlinck's most recent publications are La 
Mort (published in English in a considerably ex- 
tended collection under the title "Our Eternity"), 
(1913), "The Unknown Guest," (1914), and Les 
Debris de la Guerre ("The Wrack of the 

[64] 



Maurice Maeterlinck 

Storm"), (1916). 1 The two first named, having 
for their central subject Death and the great con- 
comitant problem of the life beyond, show that the 
author has become greatly interested in psychical 
research; he even goes so far as to affirm his belief 
in precognition. In these essays, Theosophy and 
Spiritism and kindred occult theories are care- 
fully analyzed, yet ingenious as are the author's 
speculations, they leave anything like a solution 
of the perplexing riddles far afield. On the whole 
he inclines to a telepathic explanation of the psychi- 
cal phenomena, yet thinks they may be due to the 
strivings of the cosmic intelligence after fresh 
outlets, and believes that a careful and persistent 
investigation of these phenomena may open up 
hitherto undreamt of realms of reality. In gen- 
eral, we find him on many points less assertive 
than he was in the beginning and inclined to a 
general retrenchment of the dogmatic element in 
his philosophic attitude. A significant passage in 
"The Buried Treasure" teaches us not to deplore 
the loss of fixed beliefs. "One should never look 
back with regret to those hours when a great be- 
lief abandons us. A faith that becomes extinct, 

1 "The Light Beyond" (1917) is not a new work at all, but 
merely a combination of parts from "Our Eternity" and "The 
Wrack of the Storm." 

[65] 



Prophets of Dissent 

a means that fails, a dominant idea that no longer 
dominates us because we think it is our turn to 
dominate it — these things prove that we are living, 
that we are progressing, that we are using up a 
great many things because we are not standing 
still." Of the gloomy fatalism of his literary be- 
ginnings hardly a trace is to be found in the Mae- 
terlinck of to-day. His war-book, "The Wrack 
of the Storm," breathes a calm optimism in the 
face of untold disaster. The will of man is put 
above the power of fate. "Is it possible that fa- 
tality — by which I mean what perhaps for a mo- 
ment was the unacknowledged desire of the planet 
— shall not regain the upper hand? At the stage 
which man has reached, I hope and believe so. 
... Everything seems to tell us that man is ap- 
proaching the day whereon, seizing the most glori- 
ous opportunity that has ever presented itself 
since he acquired a consciousness, he will at last 
learn that he is able, when he pleases, to control 
his whole fate in this world." * His faith in hu- 
manity is built on the heroic virtues displayed in 
this war. "To-day, not only do we know that 
these virtues exist: we have taught the world that 
they are always triumphant, that nothing is lost 

1 "The Wrack of the Storm," p. 144 f. 

[66] 



Maurice Maeterlinck 

while faith is left, while honor is intact, while love 
continues, while the soul does not surrender." . . . 
Death itself is now threatened with extinction by 
our heroic race: "The more it exercises its rav- 
ages, the more it increases the intensity of that 
which it cannot touch; the more it pursues its 
phantom victories, the better does it prove to us 
that man will end by conquering death." 

In the concluding chapter of "Our Eternity," 
the romantic modification of Maeterlinck's mysti- 
cism is made patent in his confession regarding the 
problem of Knowledge: "I have added nothing 
to what was already known. I have simply tried 
to separate what may be true from that which is 
assuredly not true. . . . Perhaps through our 
quest for that undiscoverable Truth we shall have 
accustomed our eyes to pierce the terror of the 
last hour by looking it full in the face. . . . We 
need have no hope that any one will utter on this 
earth the word that shall put an end to our un- 
certainties. It is very probable, on the contrary, 
that no one in this world, nor perhaps in the next, 
will discover the great secret of the universe. 
And ... it is most fortunate that it should be so. 
We have not only to resign ourselves to living in 
the incomprehensible, but to rejoice that we can- 

[67] 



Prophets of Dissent 

not get out of it. If there were no more insoluble 
questions . . . infinity would not be infinite; and 
then we should have forever to curse the fate 
that placed us in a universe proportionate to our 
intelligence. The unknown and the unknowable 
are necessary and will perhaps always be neces- 
sary to our happiness. In any case, I would not 
wish my worst enemy, were his understanding a 
thousandfold loftier and a thousandfold might- 
ier than mine, to be condemned eternally to inhabit 
a world of which he had surprised an essential 
secret. . . ." 1 

So the final word of Maeterlinck's philosophy, 
after a lifetime of ardent search, clears up none 
of the tantalizing secrets of our existence. And 
yet somehow it bears a message that is full of con- 
solation. The value of human life lies in the per- 
petual movement towards a receding goal. Who- 
ever can identify himself with such a philosophy 
and accept its great practical lesson, that we shall 
never reach Knowledge but acquire wisdom in the 
pursuit, should be able to envisage the veiled coun- 
tenance of Truth without despair, and even to face 
with some courage the eternal problem of our 
being, its reason and its destination. 

1 Quoted from the excellent translation by A. T. de Mattos. 

[68] 



AUGUST STRINDBERG 



II 

THE ECCENTRICITY OF AUGUST STRINDBERG 

ONE cannot speak of August Strindberg 
with much gusto. The most broadmind- 
ed critic will find himself under necessity 
to disapprove of him as a man and to condemn 
so many features of his production that almost 
one might question his fitness as a subject of lit- 
erary discussion. Nevertheless, his importance is 
beyond dispute and quite above the consideration 
of personal like or dislike, whether we view him 
in his creative capacity, — as an intellectual and 
ethical spokesman of his time, — or in his human 
character, — as a typical case of certain mental 
and moral maladies which somehow during his 
time were more or less epidemic throughout the 
lettered world. We have it on excellent authority 
that at his debut in the literary theatre he made 
the stage quake with the elemental power of his 
personality. Gigantic rebels like Ibsen, Bjoern- 
son, Nietzsche, and Tolstoy, we are told, dwindled 

[71] 



Prophets of Dissent 

to normal proportions beside his titanic stature. 
He aimed to conquer and convert the whole world 
by his fanatical protest against the rotten civiliza- 
tion of his time. The attempt proved an utter 
failure. He never could grow into a world-figure, 
because he lacked the courage as well as the cos- 
mopolitan adaptability needed for intellectual ex- 
patriation. Hence, in great contrast to Ibsen, he 
remained to Europe at large the uncouth Scandi- 
navian, while in the eyes of Scandinavia he was 
specifically the Swede; and his country-men, even 
though they acknowledged him their premier poet, 
treated him, because of his eccentricity, as a na- 
tional gazing-stock rather than as a genuine na- 
tional asset. Yet for all that, he ranks as the 
foremost writer of his country and one of the 
representative men of the age. His poetic genius 
is admitted by practically all the critics, while the 
greatest among them, George Brandes, pronounces 
him in addition an unsurpassed master in the 
command of his mother tongue. But his position 
as a writer is by no means limited to his own lit- 
tle country. For his works have been translated 
into all civilized languages, and if the circulation 
of literary products is a safe indication of their 
influence, then several of Strindberg's books at 

[72] 



August Strindberg 

least must be credited with having done something 
toward shaping the thought of our time upon some 
of its leading issues. In any case, the large and 
durable interest shown his productions marks 
Strindberg as a literary phenomenon of sufficient 
consequence to deserve some study. 

Readers of Strindberg who seek to discover the 
reason why criticism should have devoted so much 
attention to an author regarded almost universally 
with strong disapproval and aversion, will find 
that reason most probably in the extreme subjec- 
tiveness that dominates everything he has written; 
personal confession, novels, stories^ and plays 
alike share this equality, and even in his historical 
dramas the figures, despite the minute accuracy of 
their delineation, are moved by the author's pas- 
sion, not their own. Rarely, if ever, has a writer 
of eminence demonstrated a similar incapacity to 
reproduce the thoughts and feelings of other peo- 
ple. It has been rightly declared that all his lead- 
ing characters are merely the outward projections 
of his own sentiments and ideas, — that at bottom 
he, August Strindberg, is the sole protagonist in 
all his dramaturgy and fiction. 

Strindberg was a man with an omnivorous in- 
tellectual curiosity, and he commanded a vast store 

[73] 



Prophets of Dissent 

of knowledge in the fields of history, science, and 
languages. His "History of the Swedish People" 
is recognized by competent judges as a very bril- 
liant and scholarly performance. Before' he was 
launched in his literary career, and while still ob- 
scurely employed as minor assistant at a library, 
he earned distinction as a student of the Chinese 
language, and one product of his research work in 
that field was even deemed worthy of being read 
before the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles 
Lettres. In Geology, Chemistry, Botany, he was 
equally productive. But the taint of eccentricity 
in his mental fibre prevented his imposing scientific 
accomplishments from maintaining him in a state 
of intellectual equilibrium. He laid as much store 
by things of which he had a mere smattering as 
by those on which he was an authority, and his 
resultant unsteadiness caused him to oscillate be- 
tween opposite scientific enthusiasms even as his 
self-contradictory personal character involved him 
in abrupt changes of position, and made him jump 
from one extreme of behavior to the other. 



Strindberg first attracted public notice by the 
appearance in 1879 of a novel named u The Red 
Room." Its effect upon a country characterized 

[74] 



August Strindberg 

by so keen an observer as George Brandes as per- 
haps the most conservative in Europe resembled 
the excitement caused by Schiller's "The Robbers" 
almost precisely one hundred years before. It 
stirred up enough dust to change, though not to 
cleanse, the musty atmosphere of Philistia. For 
here was instantly recognized the challenge of a 
radical spirit uprisen in full and ruthless rebellion 
against each and every time-hallowed usage and 
tradition. The recollection of that hot-spur agita- 
tor bent with every particle of his strength to 
rouse the world up from its lethargy by his stento- 
rian "J'accuse" and to pass sentence upon it by 
sheer tremendous vociferation, is almost entirely 
obliterated to-day by the remembrance of quite 
another Strindberg: — the erstwhile stormy idealist 
changed into a leering cynic; a repulsive embodi- 
ment of negation, a grimacing Mephistopheles 
who denies life and light or anything that he can- 
not comprehend, and to whom the face of the 
earth appears forever covered with darkness and 
filth and death and corruption. Indeed this final 
depictment of August Strindberg, whether or no 
it be accurately true to life, is a terrible example 
of what life can make of a man, or a man of his 
life, if he is neither light enough to be borne by 

[75] 






Prophets of Dissent 

the current of his time, nor strong enough to set 
his face against the tide and breast it. 

The question is, naturally, was Strindberg sin- 
cere in the fanatical insurgency of his earlier 
period, or was his attitude merely a theatrical pose 
and his social enthusiasm a ranting declamation? 
In either case, there opens up this other question : 
Have we reason to doubt the sincerity of the men- 
tal changes that were yet to follow, — the genuine- 
ness of his pessimism, occultism, and, in the final 
stage, of his religious conversion? His unex- 
ampled hardihood in reversing his opinions and 
going dead against his convictions could be illus- 
trated in nearly every sphere of thought. At one 
time a glowing admirer of Rousseau and loudly 
professing his gospel of nature, he forsook this 
allegiance, and chose as his new idol Rousseau's 
very antipode, Voltaire. For many years he was 
a democrat of the purest water, identified himself 
with the proletarian cause, and acted as the fiery 
champion of the poor labor-driven masses against 
their oppressors; but one fine day, no matter 
whether it came about directly through his contact 
with Nietzsche or otherwise, he repudiated social- 
ism, scornfully denouncing it as a tattered remnant 
of his cast-off Christianity, and arrayed himself 

[76] 



August Strindberg 

on the side of the elect, or self-elect, against the 
"common herd," the "much-too-many." License 
for the best to govern the rest, became temporarily 
his battle-cry; and his political ideal suggested 
nothing less completely absurd than a republic pre- 
sided over by an oligarchy of autocrats. His un- 
surpassed reputation as an anti-feminist would 
hardly prepare us to find his earlier works fairly 
aglow with sympathy for the woman cause. He 
held at one time, as did Tolstoy, that art and 
poetry have a detrimental effect upon the natural 
character; for which reason the peasant is a more 
normal being than the lettered man. Especially 
was he set against the drama, on the ground that 
it throws the public mind into confusion by its 
failure to differentiate sharply between the au- 
thor's own opinions and those of the characters. 
Literature, he held, should pattern itself after a 
serious newspaper: it should seek to influence, 
not entertain. Not only did he drop this pedantic 
restriction of literature in the end, but in his own 
practice he had always defied it, because, despite 
his fierce campaign against art, he could not over- 
come the force of his artistic impulses. And so in 
other provinces of thought, too, he reversed his 
judgment with a temerity and swiftness that great- 

[77] 



Prophets of Dissent 

ly offended the feelings and perplexed the intelli- 
gence of his followers for the time being and justi- 
fied the question whether Strindberg had any prin- 
ciples at all. In politics he was by quick turns 
Anarchist and Socialist, Radical and Conservative, 
Republican and Aristocrat, Communist and Ego- 
ist; in religion, Pietist, Protestant, Deist, Atheist, 
Occultist, and Roman Catholic. And yet unques- 
tionably he was honest. To blame him merely 
because he changed his views, and be it never so 
radically, would be blaming a man for exercising 
his right to develop. In any man of influence, an 
unalterable permanency of opinion would be even 
more objectionable than a frequent shift of his 
point of view. In recent times the presumable 
length of a person's intellectual usefulness has 
been a live subject of discussion which has re- 
sulted in some legislation of very questionable 
wisdom, for instance the setting of an arbitrary 
age limit for the active service of high-grade teach- 
ers. In actual experience men are too old to teach, 
or through any other function to move the minds 
of younger people in a forward direction, when- 
ever they have lost the ability to change their own 
mind. Yet at all events, an eminent author's right 
of self-reversal must not be exercised at random ; 

[78] 



August Strindberg 

he should refrain from the propagation of new 
opinions that have not ripened within himself. 
Which is the same as saying that he should stick 
to his old opinions until he finds himself inwardly 
compelled to abandon them. But as a matter of 
fact, a man like Strindberg, propelled by an un- 
bridled imagination, alert with romantic tenden- 
cies, nervously overstrung, kept constantly under a 
strain by his morbidly sensitive temperament, — 
and whose brain is consequently a seething chaos 
of conflicting ideas, is never put to the necessity 
of changing his mind; his mind keeps changing it- 
self. 

It must be as difficult for the literary historian 
to do Strindberg full justice as it was for the great 
eccentric himself; when in taking stock, as it were, 
of his mental equipment, during one of his pro- 
tracted periods of despondency, he summed him- 
self up in the following picturesque simile: "A 
monstrous conglomeration, changing its forms ac- 
cording to the observer's point of view and pos- 
sessing no more reality than the rainbow that is 
visible to the eyes and yet does not exist." His 
evolution may be tracked, however, in the detailed 
autobiography in which he undertook, by a rigor- 
ous application of Hippolyte Taine's well-known 

[79] 



Prophets of Dissent 

theory and method, to account for his tempera- 
mental peculiarities on the basis of heredity and 
the milieu and to describe the gradual transforma- 
tion of his character through education and the 
external pressure of contemporary intellectual 
movements. This remarkable work is like a pic- 
ture book of ideals undermined, hollowed, and 
shattered; a perverse compound of cynicism and 
passion, it is unspeakably loathsome to the sense 
of beauty and yet, in the last artistic reckoning, 
not without great beauty of its own. It divides 
the story of Strindberg's life into these consecu- 
tive parts: The Son of the Servant; The Author; 
The Evolution of a Soul; The Confession of a 
Fool; Inferno; Legends; The Rupture; Alone. 
The very titles signalize the brutal frankness, or, 
shall we say, terrible sincerity of a tale that rum- 
mages without piety among the most sacred priva- 
cies, and drags forth from intimate nooks and cor- 
ners sorrow and squalor and shame enough to 
have wrecked a dozen average existences. There 
is no mistaking or evading the challenge hurled 
by this story: See me as I am, stripped of con- 
ventional lies and pretensions ! Look upon my 
naked soul, covered with scars and open sores. 
Behold me in my spasms of love and hate, now in 

[80] 



August Strindberg 

demoniacal transports, now prostrate with an- 
guish ! And if you want to know how I came to 
be what I am, consider my ancestry, my bringing 
up, my social environment, and be sure also to 
pocket your own due share of the blame for my de- 
struction! — Certainly Strindberg's autobiography 
is not to be recommended as a graduation gift for 
convent-bred young ladies, or as a soothing diver- 
sion for convalescents, but if accepted in a proper 
sense, it will be found absorbing, informative, and 
even helpful. 

Strindberg never forgave his father for having 
married below his station. He felt that the good 
blood of the Strindbergs, — respectable merchants 
and ministers and country gentlemen, — was 
worsened by the proletarian strain imported into 
it through a working girl named Eleonore Ulrike 
Norling, the mother of August Strindberg and his 
eleven brothers and sisters. During August's 
childhood the family lived in extremely straitened 
circumstances. When a dozen people live cooped 
up in three rooms, some of them are more than 
likely to have the joy of youth crushed out of 
them and crowded from the premises. Here was 
the first evil that darkened Strindberg's life : he 
simply was cheated out of his childhood. 

[81] 



Prophets of Dissent 

School was no happier place for him than home. 
His inordinate pride, only sharpened by the con- 
sciousness of his parents' poverty which bordered 
on pauperism, threw him into a state of perpetual 
rebellion against comrades and teachers. And all 
this time his inner life was tossed hither and 
thither by a general intellectual and emotional 
restlessness due to an insatiable craving for knowl- 
edge. At fifteen years of age he had reached a full 
conviction on the irredeemable evilness of life; 
and concluded, in a moment of religious exalta- 
tion, to dedicate his own earthly existence to the 
vicarious expiation of universal sin through the 
mortification of the flesh. Then, of a sudden, he 
became a voracious reader of rationalistic litera- 
ture, and turned atheist with almost inconceivable 
dispatch, but soon was forced back by remorse 
into the pietistic frame of mind, — only to pass 
through another reaction immediately after. At 
this time he claims that earthly life is a punish- 
ment or a probation ; but that it lies in man's power 
to make it endurable by freeing himself from the 
social restraints. He has become a convert to 
the fantastic doctrine of Jean Jacques Rousseau, 
that man is good by nature but has been depraved 
by civilization. Now in his earliest twenties, he 

[82] 



August Strindberg 

embraces communism with all its implications, — 
free love, state parenthood, public ownership of 
utilities, equal division of the fruits of labor, and 
so forth, — as the sole and sure means of salvation 
for humanity. 

In the "Swiss Stories," subtitled "Utopias in 
Reality," 1 Strindberg demonstrated to his own 
satisfaction the smooth and practical workings 
of that doctrine. It was difficult for him to under- 
stand why the major part of the world seemed so 
hesitant about adopting so tempting and equitable 
a scheme of living. Yet, for his own person, too, 
he soon disavowed socialism, because under a 
socialistic regime the individual would be liable to 
have his ideas put into uniform, and the remotest 
threat of interference with his freedom of thought 
was something this fanatical apostle of liberty 
could not brook. 

In the preface to the "Utopias," he had re- 
ferred to himself as "a convinced socialist, like all 
sensible people" ; whereas now he writes : "Ideal- 
ism and Socialism are two maladies born of lazi- 
ness." Having thus scientifically diagnosed the 
disease and prescribed the one true specific for it, 

1 The stories deal among other things with the harmonious 
communal life in Godin's Phalanstere. Strindberg wrote two 
descriptions of it, one before, the other after visiting the colony. 

[83] 



Prophets of Dissent 

namely — how simple ! — the total abolition of the 
industries, he resumes the preaching of Rousseau- 
ism in its simon-pure form, orders every man to 
be his maid-of-all-work and jack-of-all-trades, 
puts the world on a vegetarian diet, and then won- 
ders why the socialists denounce and revile him as 
a turncoat and an apostate. 



The biography throws an especially vivid light 
on Strindberg's relation to one of the most im- 
portant factors of socialism, to wit, the question 
of woman's rights. His position on this issue is 
merely a phase of that extreme and practically 
isolated position in regard to woman in general 
that has more than any other single element de- 
termined the feeling of the public towards him 
and by consequence fixed his place in contempo- 
rary literature. That this should be so is hardly 
unfair, because no other element has entered so 
deeply into the structure and fibre of his thought 
and feeling. 

Strindberg, as has been stated, was not from 
the outset, or perchance constitutionally, an anti- 
feminist. In "The Red Room" he preaches equal- 
ity of the sexes even in marriage. The thesis of 
the book is that man and woman are not antago- 

[84] 



August Strindberg 

nistic phenomena of life, rather they are modifica- 
tions of the same phenomenon, made for mutual 
completion; hence, they can only fulfill their natu- 
ral destiny through close cooperative comrade- 
ship. But there were two facts that prevented 
Strindberg from proceeding farther along this 
line of thought. One was his incorrigible pro- 
pensity to contradiction, the other his excessive 
subjectiveness which kept him busy building up 
theories on the basis of personal experience. The 
prodigious feminist movement launched in Scandi- 
navia by Ibsen and Bjoernson was very repugnant 
to him, because he felt, not without some just rea- 
son, that the movement was for a great many 
people little more than a fad. So long as art and 
literature are influenced by fashion, so long there 
will be and should be revolts against the vogue. 
Moreover, Strindberg felt that the movement was 
being carried too far. He was prepared to ac- 
company Ibsen some distance on the way of re- 
form, but refused to subscribe to his verdict that 
the whole blame for our crying social maladjust- 
ments rests with the unwillingness of men to allot 
any rights whatsoever to women. 

Strindberg's play, "Sir Bengt's Wife," printed 
in 1882, but of much earlier origin, is interpreted 

[85] 



Prophets of Dissent 

by Brandes as a symbolical portrayal of feminine 
life in Scandinavia during the author's early man- 
hood. The leading feminine figure, a creature 
wholly incapable of understanding or appreciating 
the nobler traits in man, is nevertheless treated 
with sympathy, on the whole. She is represent- 
ed, — like Selma Bratsberg in Ibsen's "The League 
of Youth," and Nora Helmer, in "A Doll's 
House," — as the typical and normal victim of a 
partial and unfair training. Her faults of judg- 
ment and errors of temper are due to the fact so 
forcefully descanted upon by Selma, that women 
are not permitted to share the interests and anx- 
ieties of their husbands. We are expressly in- 
formed by Strindberg that this drama was intend- 
ed, in the first place, as an attack upon the ro- 
mantic proclivities of feminine education; in the 
second, as an illustration of the power of love to 
subdue the will; in the third, as a defense of the 
thesis that woman's love is of a higher quality than 
man's ; and lastly, as a vindication of the right of 
woman to be her own master. Again, in "Mar- 
ried" he answers the query, Shall women vote? 
distinctly in the affirmative, although here the 
fixed idea about the congenital discordance be- 
tween the sexes, and the identification of love with 

[86] 



August Strindberg 

a struggle for supremacy, has already seized hold 
of him. 

To repeat, there was at first nothing absolutely 
preposterous about Strindberg' s position in regard 
to the woman movement. On the contrary, his 
view might have been endorsed as a not altogether 
unwholesome corrective for the ruling fashion of 
dealing with the issue by the advocacy of extremes. 
But by force of his supervening personal grievance 
against the sex, Strindberg's anti-feminism became 
in the long run the fixed pole about which gravi- 
tated his entire system of social and ethical 
thought. His campaign against feminism, which 
otherwise could have served a good purpose by 
curbing wild militancy, was defeated by its own 
exaggerations. Granting that feminists had gone 
too far in the denunciation of male brutality and 
despotism, Strindberg went still farther in the op- 
posite direction, when he deliberately set out to 
lay bare the character of woman by dissecting 
some of her most diabolical incarnations. As has 
already been said, he was utterly incapable of 
objective thinking, and under the sting of his 
miseries in love and marriage, dislike of woman 
turned into hatred and hatred into frenzy. Hence- 
forth, the entire spectacle of life presented itself 

[87] 



Prophets of Dissent 

to his distorted vision as a perpetual state of war 
between the sexes: on the one side he saw the 
male, strong of mind and heart, but in the generos- 
ity of strength guileless and over-trustful; on the 
other side, the female, weak of body and intellect, 
but shrewd enough to exploit her frailness by link- 
ing iniquity to impotence and contriving by her 
treacherous cunning to enslave her natural su- 
perior: — it is the story of Samson and Delilah 
made universal in its application. Love is shown 
up as the trap in which man is caught to be shorn 
of his power. The case against woman is classic- 
ally drawn up in "The Father," one of the 
strangest and at the same time most powerful 
tragedies of Strindberg. The principals of the 
plot stand for the typical character difference be- 
tween the sexes as Strindberg sees it ; the man being 
kind-hearted, good-natured, and aspiring, whereas 
the woman, setting an example for all his succeed- 
ing portraits of women, is cunning, though unin- 
telligent and coarse-grained, soulless, yet insanely 
ambitious and covetous of power. In glaring con- 
trast to the situation made so familiar by Ibsen, 
we here see the man struggling away from the 
clutches of a woman who declares frankly that 
she has never looked at a man without feeling 

[88] 



August Strindberg 

conscious of her superiority over him. In this 
play the man, a person of ideals and real ability, 
who is none other than Strindberg himself in one 
of his matrimonial predicaments, fails to extricate 
himself from the snare, and ends — both literally 
and figuratively — by being put into the strait- 
jacket. 

Without classing Strindberg as one of the great 
world dramatists, it would be narrow-minded, 
after experiencing the gripping effect of some of 
his plays, to deny them due recognition, for in- 
deed they would be remarkable for their per- 
spicacity and penetration, even if they were de- 
void of any value besides. They contain the keen- 
est analyses ever made of the vicious side of fem- 
inine character, obtained by specializing, as it were, 
on the more particularly feminine traits of human 
depravity. Assuredly the procedure is onesided, 
but the delineation of a single side of life is be- 
yond peradventure a legitimate artistic enterprise 
as long as it is not palmed upon us as an accurate 
and complete picture. Unfortunately, Strindberg' s 
abnormal vision falsifies the things he looks at, 
and, being steeped in his insuperable prejudice, his 
pictures of life, in spite of the partial veracity they 
possess, never rise above the level of caricatures. 

[8 9 ] 



Prophets of Dissent 

He was incompetent to pass judgment upon an 
individual woman separately; to him all women 
were alike, and that means, all unmitigatedly bad! 
To the objection raised by one of the characters 
in "The Father" : u Oh, there are so many kinds 
of women," the author's mouthpiece makes this 
clinching answer: "Modern investigation has pro- 
nounced that there is only one kind." 

The autobiography of Strindberg is largely in- 
spired by his unreasoning hatred of women; the 
result, in the main, of his three unfortunate ven- 
tures into the uncongenial field of matrimony. In 
its first part, the account of his life is not without 
some traces of healthy humor, but as the story 
progresses, his entire philosophy of life becomes 
more and more aberrant under the increasing pres- 
sure of that obsession. He gets beside himself 
at the mere mention of anything feminine, and 
blindly hits away, let his bludgeon land where it 
will; logic, common sense, and common decency 
go to the floor before his vehement and brutal 
assault. Every woman is a born liar and traitor. - 
Her sole aim in life is to thrive parasitically upon 
the revenue of her favors. Since marriage and 
prostitution cannot provide a living for all, the 
oversupply now clamor for admission to the work- 

[90] 



August Strindberg 

mart; but they are incompetent and lazy, and in- 
veterate shirkers of responsibility. With triumph- 
ant malice he points to the perfidious readiness of 
woman to perform her tasks by proxy, that is, to 
delegate them to hired substitutes : her children are 
tended and taught by governesses and teachers; 
her garments are made by dressmakers and seam- 
stresses; the duties of her household she unloads 
on servants, — and from selfish considerations of 
vanity, comfort, and love of pleasure, she with- 
draws even from the primary maternal obligation 
and lets her young be nourished at the breast of a 
stranger. Strindberg in his rage never stops to 
think that the deputies in these cases, — cooks and 
housemaids and nurses and so forth, — themselves 
belong to the female sex, by which fact the im- 
peachment is in large part invalidated. 

The play bearing the satirical title "Comrades" 
makes a special application of the theory about 
the pre-established antagonism of the sexes. In 
a situation similar to that in "The Father," hus- 
band and wife are shown in a yet sharper antith- 
esis of character: a man of sterling character 
and ability foiled by a woman in all respects his 
inferior, yet imperiously determined to dominate 
him. At first she seems to succeed in her ambi- 

[91] 



Prophets of Dissent 

tion, and in the same measure as she assumes a 
more and more mannish demeanor, the husband's 
behavior grows more and more effeminate. But 
the contest leads to results opposite to .those in 
"The Father." Here, the man, once he is brought 
to a full realization of his plight, arouses himself 
from his apathy, reasserts his manhood, and, in 
the ensuing fight for supremacy, routs the usurper 
and comes into his own. The steps by which he 
passes through revolt from subjection to self- 
liberation, are cleverly signaled by his outward 
transformation, as he abandons the womanish 
style of dressing imposed on him by his wife's 
whim and indignantly flings into a corner the fem- 
inine costume which she would make him wear at 
the ball. 



Leaving aside, then, all question as to their ar- 
tistic value, Strindberg's dramas are deserving of 
attention as experiments in a fairly unexplored 
field of analytic psychology. They are the first 
literary creations of any great importance begot- 
ten by such bitter hatred of woman. The anti- 
feminism of Strindberg's predecessors, not except- 
ing that arch-misogynist, Arthur Schopenhauer 
himself, sprang from contempt, not from abhor- 

[92] 



August Strindberg 

rence and abject fear. In Strindberg, misogyny 
turns into downright gynophobia. To him, woman 
is not an object of disdain, but the cruel and mer- 
ciless persecutor of man. In order to disclose the 
most dangerous traits of the feminine soul, Strind- 
berg dissects it by a method that corresponds 
closely to Ibsen's astonishing demonstration of 
masculine viciousness. The wide-spread dislike 
for Strindberg's dramas is due, in equal parts, to 
the detestableness of his male characters, and to 
the optimistic disbelief of the general public in the 
reality of womanhood as he represents it. Strind- 
berg's portraiture of the sex appears as a mon- 
strous slander, principally because no other painter 
has ever placed the model into the same disad- 
vantageous light, and the authenticity of his pic- 
tures is rendered suspicious by their abnormal fam- 
ily resemblance. He was obsessed with the petri- 
fying vision of a uniform cruel selfishness staring 
out of every woman's face: countess, courtezan, 
or kitchen maid, all are cast in the same gorgon 
mold. 

Strindberg's aversion towards women was prob- 
ably kindled into action, as has already been in- 
timated, by his disgust at the sudden irruption of 
woman worship into literature; but, as has also 

[93] 



Prophets of Dissent 

been made clear, only the disillusionments and 
grievances of his private experience hardened that 
aversion into implacable hatred. At first he simply 
declined to ally himself with the feminist cult, be- 
cause the women he knew seemed unworthy of 
being worshipped, — little vain dolls, frivolous co- 
quettes, and pedants given to domestic tyranny, 
of such the bulk was made up. Under the mad- 
dening spur of his personal misfortunes, his feel- 
ing passed from weariness to detestation, from 
detestation to a bitter mixture of fear and furious 
hate. He conceived it as his supreme mission 
and central purpose in life to unmask the demon 
with the angel's face, to tear the drapings from 
the idol and expose to view the hideous ogress that 
feeds on the souls of men. Woman, in Strind- 
berg's works, is a bogy, constructed out of the 
vilest ingredients that enter into the composition 
of human nature, with a kind of convulsive life 
infused by a remnant of great artistic power. And 
this grewsome fabric of a diseased imagination, 
like Frankenstein's monster, wreaks vengeance on 
its maker. His own mordant desire for her is the 
lash that drives him irresistibly to his destruction. 
It requires no profound psychologic insight to 
divine in this odious chimera the deplorable abor- 

[94] 



August Strindberg 

tion of a fine ideal. The distortion of truth ema- 
nates in Strindberg's work, as it does in any sig- 
nificant satire or caricature, from indignation over 
the contrast between a lofty conception and a 
disappointing reality. What, after all, can be the 
mission of this hard-featured gallery of females, — 
peevish, sullen, impudent, grasping, violent, lecher- 
ous, malignant, and vindictive, — if it is not to mark 
pravity and debasement with a stigma in the name 
of a pure and noble womanhood? 



It should not be left unmentioned that we owe 
to August Strindberg some works of great perfec- 
tion fairly free from the black obsession and with 
a constructive and consistently idealistic tendency : 
splendid descriptions of a quaint people and their 
habitat, tinged with a fine sense of humor, as in 
"The Hemsoe-Dwellers" ; charming studies of 
landscape and of floral and animal life, in the 
"Portraits of Flowers and Animals"; the colossal 
work on the Swedish People, once before referred 
to, a history conceived and executed in a thorough- 
ly modern scientific spirit; two volumes of "Swe- 
dish Fortunes and Adventures" ; most of his his- 
toric dramas also are of superior order. But 
these works lie outside the scope of the more spe- 

[95] 



Prophets of Dissent 

cific discussion of Strindberg as a mystic and an 
eccentric to which this sketch is devoted. We may 
conclude by briefly considering the final phases of 
Strindberg's checkered intellectual career, and by 
summing up his general significance for the age. 

It will be recalled that during the middle period 
of his life, (in 1888), Strindberg came into per- 
sonal touch with Nietzsche. The effect of the lat- 
ter' s sensational philosophy is clearly perceptible 
in the works of that period, notably in "Tschan- 
dala" and "By the Open Sea." Evidently, Nietz- 
sche, at first, was very congenial to him. For 
both men were extremely aristocratic in their in- 
stincts. For a while, Strindberg endorsed un- 
qualifiedly the heterodox ethics of the towering 
paranoiac. For one thing, that philosophy supplied 
fresh food and fuel to his burning rage against 
womankind, and that was enough to bribe him into 
swallowing, for the time being, the entire sub- 
stance of Nietzsche's fantastic doctrine. He took 
the same ground as Nietzsche, that the race had 
deteriorated in consequence of its sentimentality, 
namely through the systematic protection of physi- 
cal and mental inferiority and unchecked procrea- 
tion of weaklings. He seconded Nietzsche's mo- 
tion that society should exterminate its parasites, 

[96] 



August Strindberg 

instead of pampering them. Mankind can only 
be reinvigorated if the strong and healthy are 
helped to come into their own. The dreams of the 
pacifists are fatal to the pragmatic virtues and to 
the virility of the race. The greatest need is an 
aggressive campaign for the moral and intellectual 
sanitation of the world. So let the brain rule over 
the heart, — and so forth in the same strain. 

Very soon, however, Strindberg passed out of 
the sphere of Nietzsche's influence. The aliena- 
tion was due as much to his general instability as 
to the disparity between his pessimistic temper and 
the joyous exaltation of Zarathustra-ism. His 
striking reversion to orthodoxy was by no means 
illogical. Between pessimism and faith there ex- 
ists a relation that is not very far to seek. When 
a person has forfeited his peace of soul and can- 
not find grace before his own conscience, he might 
clutch as a last hope the promise of vicarious re- 
demption. Extending the significance of his own 
personal experience to everything within his hori- 
zon, and erecting a dogmatic system upon this 
tenuous generalization, Strindberg reached the 
conviction that the purpose of living is to suffer, 
a conviction that threw his philosophy well into 
line with the religious and ethical ideas of the 

[97] 



Prophets of Dissent 

middle age. Yet even at this juncture his cynicism 
did not desert him, as witness this comment of his : 
"Religion must be a punishment, because nobody 
gets religion who does not have a bad conscience." 
This avowal preceded his saltatory approach to 
Roman Catholicism. 

In the later volumes of his autobiography he 
minutely describes the successive crises through 
which he passed in his agonizing search for certi- 
tude and salvation before his spirit found rest in 
the idea of Destiny which formerly to him was 
synonymous with Fate and now became synony- 
mous with Providence. "Inferno" pictures his ex- 
istence as a protracted and unbroken nightmare. 
He turned determinist, then fatalist, then mystic. 
The most trifling incidents of his daily life were 
spelt out according to Swedenborg's "Science of 
Correspondences" and thereby assumed a deep 
and terrifying significance. In the most trivial 
events, such as the opening or shutting of a door, 
or the curve etched by a raindrop on a dusty pane 
of glass, he perceived intimations from the occult 
power that directed his life. Into the most ordi- 
nary occurrence of the day he read a divine order, 
or threat, or chastisement. He was tormented 
by terrible dreams and visions; in the guise of 

[98] 



August Strindberg 

ferocious beasts, his own sins agonized his flesh. 
And in the midst of all these tortures he studied 
and practised the occult arts: magic, astrology, 
necromancy, alchemy; he concocted gold by her- 
metical science! To all appearances utterly de- 
ranged, he was still lucid enough at intervals to 
carry on chemical, botanical, and physiological ex- 
periments of legitimate worth. Then his reason 
cleared up once again and put a sudden end to an 
episode which he has described in these words : 
"To go in quest of God and to find the devil, — 
that is what happened to me." 

He took leave of Swedenborg as he had taken 
leave of Nietzsche, yet retained much gratitude 
for him; the great Scandinavian seer had brought 
him back to God, so he averred, even though the 
conversion was effected by picturings of horror. 

"Legends," the further continuation of his self- 
history, shows him vividly at his closest contact 
with the Catholic Church. But the most satisfac- 
tory portion of the autobiography from a human 
point of view, and from a literary point perhaps 
altogether the best thing Strindberg has done, is 
the closing book of the series, entitled "Alone." 
He wrote it at the age of fifty, during a period of 
comparative tranquillity of mind, and that fact is 

[99] 



Prophets of Dissent 

manifested by the composure and moderation of 
its style. Now at last his storm-tossed soul seems 
to have found a haven. He accepts his destiny, 
and resigns himself to believing, since knowledge 
is barred. 

But even this state of serenity harbored no per- 
manent peace; it signified merely a temporary sus- 
pension of those terrific internal combats. 

In Strindberg's case, religious conversion is not 
an edifying, but on the contrary a morbid and sad- 
dening spectacle; it is equal to a declaration of 
complete spiritual bankruptcy, He turns to the 
church after finding all other pathways to God 
blocked. His type of Christianity does not hang 
together with the labors and struggles of his 
secular life. A break with his past can be denied 
to no man; least of all to a leader of men. Only, 
if he has deserted the old road, he should be able 
to lead in the new; he must have a new message 
if he sees fit to cancel the old. Strindberg, how- 
ever, has nothing to offer at the end. He stands 
before us timorous and shrinking, the accuser of 
his fellows turned self-accuser, a beggar stretch- 
ing forth empty, trembling hands imploring for- 
giveness of his sins and the salvation of his soul 
through gracious mediation. His moral assevera- 
[ioo] 



August Strindberg 

tions are either blank truisms, or intellectual aber- 
rations. Strindberg has added nothing to the stock 
of human understanding. A preacher, of course, 
is not in duty bound to generate original thought. 
Indeed if such were to be exacted, our pulpits* 
would soon be as sparsely peopled as already are 
the pews. Ministers who are wondering hard 
why so many people stay away from church might 
well stop to consider whether the reason is not 
that a large portion of mankind has already se- 
cured, theoretically, a religious or ethical basis of 
life more or less identical with the one which 
churches content themselves with offering. The 
greatest religious teacher of modern times, Leo 
Tolstoy, was not by any means a bringer of new 
truths. The true secret of the tremendous power 
which nevertheless he wielded over the souls of 
men was that he extended the practical applica- 
tion of what he believed. If, therefore, we look 
for a lesson in Strindberg's life as recited by him- 
self, we shall not find it in his religious conversion. 



Taken in its entirety, his voluminous yet frag- 
mentary life history is one of the most painful 
human documents on record. One can hardly 
peruse it without asking: Was Strindberg insane? 
[IOI] 



Prophets of Dissent 

It is a question which he often put to himself 
when remorse and self-reproach gnawed at his 
conscience and when he fancied himself scorned 
and persecuted by all his former friends, "Why 
are you so hated?" he asks himself in one of his 
dialogues, and this is his answer: "I could not 
endure to see mankind suffer, and so I said and 
wrote : Tree yourselves, I shall help.' And so I 
said to the poor : 'Do not let the rich suck your 
blood.' And to woman: 'Do not let man oppress 
you.' And to the children: 'Do not obey your 
parents if they are unjust' The consequences, — 
well, they are quite incomprehensible; for of a 
sudden I had both sides against me, rich and poor, 
men and women, parents and children; add to 
that sickness and poverty, disgraceful pauperism, 
my divorce, lawsuits, exile, loneliness, and now, to 
top the climax, — do you believe that I am insane?" 
From his ultra-subjective point of view, the ex- 
planation here given of the total collapse of his 
fortunes is fairly accurate, at least in the essential 
aspects. Still, many great men have been pur- 
sued by a similar conflux of calamities. Over- 
whelming misfortunes are the surest test of man- 
hood. How high a person bears up his head under 
the blows of fate is the best gage of his stature. 
[102] 



August Strindberg 

But Strindberg, in spite of his colossal physique, 
was not cast in the heroic mold. The breakdown 
of his fortunes caused him to turn traitor to him- 
self, to recant and destroy his intellectual past. 

Whether he was actually insane is a question for 
psychiaters to settle ; normal he certainly was not. 
In medical opinion his modes of reacting to the 
obstructions and difficulties of the daily life were 
conclusively symptomatic of neurasthenia. Cer- 
tain obsessive ideas and idiosyncracies of his, 
closely bordering upon phobia, would seem to in- 
dicate grave psychic disorder. His temper and 
his world-view were indicative of hypochondria : 
he perceived only the hostile, never the friendly, 
aspects of events, people, and phenomena. De- 
jectedly he declares: "There is falseness even in 
the calm air and the sunshine, and I feel that hap- 
piness has no place in my lot." 

Destiny had assembled within him all the doubts 
and pangs of the modern soul, but had neglected 
to counterpoise them with positive and constructive 
convictions; so that when his small store of hopes 
and prospects was exhausted, he broke down from 
sheer hollowness of heart. He died a recluse, a 
penitent, and a renegade to all his past ideas and 
persuasions. 

[103] 



Prophets of Dissent 

Evidently, with his large assortment of defects 
both of character and of intellect, Strindberg 
could not be classed as one of the great construc- 
tive minds of our period. Viewed in his social 
importance, he will interest future students of 
morals chiefly as an agitator, a polemist, and in 
a fashion, too, as a prophet; by his uniquely ag- 
gressive veracity, he rendered a measure of valu- 
able service to his time. 

But viewed as a creative writer, both of drama 
and fiction, he has an incontestable claim to our 
lasting attention. His work shows artistic ability, 
even though it rarely attains to greatness and is 
frequently marred by the bizarre qualities of his 
style. Presumably his will be a permanent place 
in the history of literature, principally because of 
the extraordinary subjective animation of his work. 
And perhaps in times less depressed than ours 
its gloominess may act as a valuable antidote upon 
the popular prejudice against being serious. His 
artistic profession of faith certainly should save 
him from wholesale condemnation. He says in 
one of his prefaces: "Some people have accused 
my tragedy of being too sad, as though one de- 
sired a merry tragedy. People clamor for En- 
joyment as though Enjoyment consisted in being 
[104] 



August Strindberg 

foolish. I find enjoyment in the powerful and 
terrible struggles of life; and the capability of 
experiencing something, of learning something, 
gives me pleasure. " 

The keynote to his literary productions is the 
cry of the agony of being. Every line of his 
works is written in the shadow of the sorrow of 
living. In them, all that is most dismal and terri- 
fying and therefore most tragical, becomes articu- 
late. They are propelled by an abysmal pessi- 
mism, and because of this fact, since pessimism is 
one of the mightiest inspiring forces in literature, 
August Strindberg, its foremost spokesman, de- 
serves to be read and understood. 



[105] 



FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 



Ill 

THE EXALTATION OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 

IN these embattled times it is perfectly natural 
to expect from any discourse on Nietzsche's 
philosophy first of all a statement concerning 
the relation of that troublesome genius to the 
origins of the war; and this demand prompts a few 
candid words on that aspect of the subject at the 
start. 

For more than three years the public has been 
persistently taught by the press to think of Fried- 
rich Nietzsche mainly as the powerful promoter 
of a systematic national movement of the German 
people for the conquest of the world. But there 
is strong and definite internal evidence in the writ- 
ings of Nietzsche against the assumption that he 
intentionally aroused a spirit of war or aimed in 
any way at the world-wide preponderance of Ger- 
many's type of civilization. Nietzsche had a tem- 
peramental loathing for everything that is brutal, 
a loathing which was greatly intensified by his 
[109] 






Prophets of Dissent 

personal contact with the horrors of war while 
serving as a military nurse in the campaign of 
1 870. If there were still any one senseless enough 
to plead the erstwhile popular cause of Pan-Ger- 
manism, he would be likely to find more support 
for his argument in the writings of the de-gal- 
lisized Frenchman, Count Joseph Arthur Gobi- 
neau, or of the germanized Englishman, Houston 
Stewart Chamberlain, than in those of the "her- 
mit of Maria-Sils," who does not even suggest, let 
alone advocate, German world-predominance in 
a single line of all his writings. To couple Fried- 
rich Nietzsche with Heinrich von Treitschke as 
the latter' s fellow herald of German ascendancy 
is truly preposterous. Treitschke himself was bit- 
terly and irreconcilably set against the creator of 
Zarathustra, 1 in whom ever since "Unzeitgemasse 
Betrachtungen" he had divined "the good Euro- 
pean," — which to the author of the Deutsche 
Geschichte meant the bad Prussian, and by conse- 
quence the bad German. 

As a consummate individualist and by the same 
token a cosmopolite to the full, Nietzsche was the 
last remove from national, or strictly speaking 

1 As is convincingly pointed out in a footnote of J. A. Cramb's 
"Germany and England." 

[no] 



Friedrich Nietzsche 

even from racial, jingoism. Even the imputation 
of ordinary patriotic sentiments would have been 
resented by him as an insult, for such sentiments 
were to him a sure symptom of that gregarious 
disposition which was so utterly abhorrent to his 
feelings. In his German citizenhood he took no 
pride whatsoever. On every occasion that offered 
he vented in mordant terms his contempt for the 
country of his birth, boastfully proclaiming his own 
derivation from alien stock. He bemoaned his 
fate of having to write for Germans; averring 
that people who drank beer and smoked pipes 
were hopelessly incapable of understanding him. 
Of this extravagance in denouncing his countrymen 
the following account by one of his keenest Ameri- 
can interpreters gives a fair idea. "No epithet 
was too outrageous, no charge was too farfetched, 
no manipulation or interpretation of evidence was 
too daring to enter into his ferocious indictment. 
He accused the Germans of stupidity, supersti- 
tiousness, and silliness; of a chronic weakness of 
dodging issues, a fatuous 'barn-yard' and 'green- 
pasture' contentment, of yielding supinely to the 
commands and exactions of a clumsy and unintelli- 
gent government; of degrading education to the 
low level of mere cramming and examination pass- 

Em] 



Prophets of Dissent 

ing; of a congenital inability to understand and ab- 
sorb the culture of other peoples, and particularly 
the culture of the French ; of a boorish bumptious- 
ness, and an ignorant, ostrichlike complacency; of 
a systematic hostility to men of genius, whether 
in art, science, or philosophy; of a slavish devo- 
tion to the two great European narcotics, alcohol 
and Christianity; of a profound beeriness, a spirit- 
ual dyspepsia, a puerile mysticism, an old-woman- 
ish pettiness, and an ineradicable liking for the 
obscure, evolving, crepuscular, damp, and shroud- 
ed." x It certainly requires a violent twist of logic 
to hold this catalogue of invectives responsible for 
the transformation of a sluggish and indolent 
bourgeoisie into a "Volk in Waffen" unified by an 
indomitable and truculent rapacity. 

Neither should Nietzsche's general condemna- 
tion of mild and tender forbearance — on the 
ground that it blocks the purpose of nature — be in- 
terpreted as a call to universal militancy. By his 
ruling it is only supermen that are privileged to 
carry their will through. But undeniably he 
does teach that the world belongs to the strong. 
They may grab it at any temporary loss to the 

1 H. L. Mencken, "The Mailed Fist and Its Prophet." Atlantic 
Monthly, November, 19 14. 

[112] 



Friedrich Nietzsche 

common run of humanity and, if need be, with 
sanguinary force, since their will is, ulteriorly, 
identical with the cosmic purpose. 

Of course this is preaching war of some sort, 
but Nietzsche was not in favor of war on ethnic 
or ethical grounds, like that fanatical militarist, 
General von Bernhardi, whom the great mass of 
his countrymen in the time before the war would 
have bluntly rejected as their spokesman. Any- 
way, Nietzsche did not mean to encourage Ger- 
many to subjugate the rest of the world. He even 
deprecated her victory in the bloody contest of 
1870, because he thought that it had brought on 
a form of material prosperity of which internal 
decay and the collapse of intellectual and spiritual 
ideals were the unfortunate concomitants. At the 
same time, the universal decreptitude prevented 
the despiser of his own people from conceiving a 
decided preference for some other country. He 
held that all European nations were progressing 
in the wrong direction, — the deadweight of exag- 
gerated and misshapen materialism dragged them 
back and down. English life he deemed almost 
irredeemably clogged by utilitarianism. Even 
France, the only modern commonwealth credited 
by Nietzsche with an indigenous culture, was gov- 
[113] 



Prophets of Dissent 

erned by what he stigmatizes as the life philosophy 
of the shopkeeper. Nietzsche is destitute of na- 
tional ideals. In fact he never thinks in terms of 
politics. He aims to be "a good European, not a 
good German." In his aversion to the extant 
order of society he never for a moment advocates, 
like Rousseau or Tolstoy, a breach with civiliza- 
tion. Cataclysmic changes through anarchy, rev- 
olution, and war were repugnant to his ideals of 
culture. For two thousand years the races of 
Europe had toiled to humanize themselves, school 
their character, equip their minds, refine their 
tastes. Could any sane reformer have calmly con- 
templated the possible engulfment in another 
Saturnian age of the gains purchased by that 
enormous expenditure of human labor? Accord- 
ing to Nietzsche's conviction, the new dispensation 
could not be entered in a book of blank pages. A 
higher civilization could only be reared upon a 
lower. So it seems that he is quite wrongly ac- 
cused of having been an "accessory before the 
deed," in any literal or legal sense, to the stupen- 
dous international struggle witnessed to-day. And 
we may pass on to consider in what other way he 
was a vital factor of modern social development. 
For whatever we may think of the political value 

[114] 



Friedrich Nietzsche 

of his teachings, it is impossible to deny their 
arousing and inspiriting effect upon the intellectual, 
moral, and artistic faculties of his epoch and ours. 



It should be clearly understood that the signifi- 
cance of Nietzsche for our age is not to be ex- 
plained by any weighty discovery in the realm of 
knowledge. Nietzsche's merit consists not in any 
unriddling of the universe by a metaphysical key 
to its secrets, but rather in the diffusion of a new 
intellectual light elucidating human consciousness 
in regard to the purpose and the end of existence., 
Nietzsche has no objective truths to teach, indeed 
he acknowledges no truth other than subjective. 
Nor does he put any faith in bare logic, but on 
the contrary pronounces it one of mankind's great- 
est misfortunes. His argumentation is not sus- 
tained and progressive, but desultory, impression- 
istic, and freely repetitional; slashing aphorism 
is its most effective tool. And so, in the sense of 
the schools, he is not a philosopher at all; quite 
the contrary, an implacable enemy of the metier. 
And yet the formative and directive influence of 
his vaticinations, enunciated with tremendous 
spiritual heat and lofty gesture, has been very 
great. His conception of life has acted upon the 

["5] 



Prophets of Dissent 

generation as a moral intoxicant of truly incalcula- 
ble strength. 

Withal his published work, amounting to eigh- 
teen volumes, though flagrantly irrational, yet 
does contain a perfectly coherent doctrine. Only, 
it is a doctrine to whose core mere peripheric 
groping will never negotiate the approach. Its es- 
sence must be caught by flashlike seizure and can- 
not be conveyed except to minds of more than the 
average imaginative sensibility. For its central 
ideas relate to the remotest ultimates, and its 
dominant prepossession, the Overman, is, in the 
final reckoning, the creature of a Utopian fancy. 
To be more precise, Nietzsche extorts from the 
Darwinian theory of selection a set of amazing 
connotations by means of the simultaneous shift 
from the biological to the poetic sphere of thought 
and from the averagely socialized to an uncom- 
promisingly self-centred attitude of mind. This 
doubly eccentric position is rendered feasible for 
him by a whole-souled indifference to exact science 
and an intense contempt for the practical adjust- 
ments of life. He is, first and last, an imaginative 
schemer, whose visions are engendered by inner 
exuberance; the propelling power of his philos- 
ophy being an intense temperamental enthusiasm 
[116] 



Friedrich Nietzsche 

at one and the same time lyrically sensitive and 
dramatically impassioned. It is these qualities of 
soul that made his utterance ring with the force of 
a high moral challenge. All the same, he was not 
any more original in his ethics than in his theory 
of knowledge. In this field also his receptive 
mind threw itself wide open to the flow of older 
influences which it encountered. The religion of 
personal advantage had had many a prophet be- 
fore Nietzsche. Among the older writers, Ma- 
chiavelli was its weightiest champion. In Ger- 
many, Nietzsche's immediate predecessor was 
"Max Stirner," * and as regards foreign thinkers, 
Nietzsche declared as late as 1888 that to no 
other writer of his own century did he feel himself 
so closely allied by the ties of congeniality as to 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

The most superficial acquaintance with these 
writers shows that Nietzsche is held responsible 
for certain revolutionary notions of which he 
by no means was the originator. Of the connec- 
tion of his doctrine with the maxims of "The 
Prince" and of "The Ego and His Own" (Der 
Einzige und sein Eigentum) 2 nothing further need 

1 His real name was Kaspar Schmidt; he lived from 1806- 
1856. 
2 By Machiavelli and Stirner, respectively. 

[117] 



Prophets of Dissent 

be said than that to them Nietzsche owes, directly 
or indirectly, the principle of "non-morality." 
However, he does not employ the same strictly in- 
tellectual methods. They were logicians rather 
than moralists, and their ruler-man is in the main a 
construction of cold reasoning, while the ruler- 
man of Nietzsche is the vision of a genius whose 
eye looks down a much longer perspective than 
is accorded to ordinary mortals. That a far 
greater affinity of temper should have existed be- 
tween Nietzsche and Emerson than between him 
and the two classic non-moralists, must bring sur- 
prise to the many who have never recognized the 
Concord Sage as an exponent of unfettered indi- 
vidualism. Yet in fact Emerson goes to such an 
extreme of individualism that the only thing that 
has saved his memory from anathema is that he 
has not many readers in his after-times, and these 
few do not always venture to understand him. And 
Emerson, though in a different way from Nietz- 
sche's, was also a rhapsodist. In his poetry, where 
he articulates his meaning with far greater unre- 
straint than in his prose, we find without any dif- 
ficulty full corroboration of his spiritual kinship 
with Nietzsche. For instance, where may we turn 
in the works of the latter for a stronger statement 
[118] 



Friedrich Nietzsche 

of the case of Power versus Pity than is contained 
in "The World Soul"? 

u He serveth the servant, 
The brave he loves amain, 
He kills the cripple and the sick, 
And straight begins again; 
For gods delight in gods, 
And thrust the weak aside, — 
To him who scorns their charities 
Their arms fly open wide." 

From such a world-view what moral could pro- 
ceed more logically than that of Zarathustra : 
"And him whom ye do not teach to fly, teach — 
how to fall quicker"? 

But after all, the intellectual origin of Nietz- 
sche's ideas matters but little. Wheresoever they 
were derived from, he made them strikingly his 
own by raising them to the splendid elevation of 
his thought. And if nevertheless he has failed to 
take high rank and standing among the sages of 
the schools, this shortage in his professional pres- 
tige is more than counterbalanced by the wide 
reach of his influence among the laity. What 
might the re-classification, or perchance even the 
re-interpretation, of known facts about life have 

[119] 



Prophets of Dissent 

signified beside Nietzsche's lofty apprehension of 
the sacredness of life itself? For whatever may 
be the social menace of his reasoning, his com- 
manding proclamation to an expectant age of the 
doctrine that Progress means infinite growth to- 
wards ideals of perfection has resulted in a singu- 
lar reanimation of the individual sense of dignity, 
served as a potent remedy of social dry-rot, and 
furthered our gradual emergence from the impene- 
trable darkness of ancestral traditions. 

In seeking an adequate explanation of his power 
over modern minds we readily surmise that his 
philosophy draws much of its vitality from the 
system of science that underlies it. And yet while 
it is true enough that Nietzsche's fundamental 
thesis is an offshoot of the Darwinian theory, the 
violent individualism which is the driving prin- 
ciple of his entire philosophy is rather opposed to 
the general orientation of Darwinism, since that 
is social. Not to the author of the "Descent of 
Man" directly is the modern ethical glorification 
of egoism indebted for its measure of scientific 
sanction, but to one of his heterodox disciples, 
namely to the bio-philosopher W. H. Rolph, who 
in a volume named "Biologic Problems," with the 
[120] 



Friedrich Nietzsche 

subtitle, "An Essay in Rational Ethics," 1 deals 
definitely with the problem of evolution in its 
dynamical bearings. The question is raised, Why 
do the extant types of life ascend toward higher 
goals, and, on reaching them, progress toward still 
higher goals, to the end of time? Under the rea- 
son as explained by Darwin, should not evolution 
stop at a definite stage, namely, when the object of 
the competitive struggle for existence has been 
fully attained? Self-preservation naturally ceases 
to act as an incentive to further progress, so soon 
as the weaker contestants are beaten off the field 
and the survival of the fittest is abundantly se- 
cured. From there on we have to look farther for 
an adequate causation of the ascent of species. 
Unless we assume the existence of an absolutistic 
teleological tendency to perfection, we are logically 
bound to connect upward development with fa- 
vorable external conditions. By substituting for 
the Darwinian "struggle for existence" a new for- 
mula : "struggle for surplus," Rolph advances a 
new fruitful hypothesis. In all creatures the ac- 
quisitive cravings exceed the limit of actual neces- 
sity. Under Darwin's interpretation of nature, 

1 Biologische Probleme, zugleich ah Versuch einer rationellen 
Eth'ik. Leipzig, 1882. 

[121] 



Prophets of Dissent 

the struggle between individuals of the same spe- 
cies would give way to pacific equilibrium as soon 
as the bare subsistence were no longer in question. 
Yet we know that the struggle is unending. The 
creature appetites are not appeased by a normal 
sufficiency; on the contrary, "Vappetit vient en 
mangeant" ; the possessive instinct, if not quite in- 
satiable, is at least coextensive with its opportu- 
nities for gratification. Whether or not it be true 
— as Carlyle claims — that, after all, the funda- 
mental question between any two human beings is, 
"Can I kill thee, or canst thou kill me?" — at any 
rate in civilized human society the contest is not 
waged merely for the naked existence, but mainly 
for life's increments in the form of comforts, 
pleasures, luxuries, and the accumulation of power 
and influence; and the excess of acquisition over 
immediate need goes as a residuum into the struc- 
ture of civilization. In plain words, then, social 
progress is pushed on by individual greed and 
ambition. At this point Rolph rests the case, with- 
out entering into the moral implicates of the sub- 
ject, which would seem to obtrude themselves upon 
the attention. 

Now to a believer in progressive evolution with 
a strong ethical bent such a theory brings home 
[122] 



Friedrich Nietzsche 

man's ulterior responsibility for the betterment of 
life, and therefore acts as a call to his supreme 
duty of preparing the ground for the arrival of 
a higher order of beings. The argument seems 
simple and clinching. Living nature through a 
long file of species and genera has at last worked 
up to the homo sapiens who as yet does not even 
approach the perfection of his own type. Is it a 
legitimate ambition of the race to mark time on 
the stand which it has reached and to entrench 
itself impregnably in its present mediocrity? 
Nietzsche did not shrink from any of the inferen- 
tial conclusions logically to be drawn from the 
biologic argument. If growth is in the purpose of 
nature, then once we have accepted our chief office 
in life, it becomes our task to pave the way for a 
higher genus of man. And the only force that 
makes with directness for that object is the Will 
to Power. To foreshadow the resultant human 
type, Nietzsche resurrected from Goethe's vocab- 
ulary the convenient word Vbermensch — "Over- 



man. 



Any one regarding existence in the light of a 
stern and perpetual combat is of necessity driven 
at last to the alternative between making the best 
[123] 



Prophets of Dissent 

of life and making an end of it; he must either 
seek lasting deliverance from the evil of living or 
endeavor to wrest from the world by any means 
at his command the greatest sum of its gratifica- 
tions. It is serviceable to describe the two frames 
of mind respectively as the optimistic and the 
pessimistic. But it would perhaps be hasty to con- 
clude that the first of these attitudes necessarily 
betokens the greater strength of character. 

Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy sprang from 
pessimism, yet issued in an optimism of unheard- 
of exaltation; carrying, however, to the end its 
plainly visible birthmarks. He started out as an 
enthusiastic disciple of Arthur Schopenhauer; un- 
questionably the adherence was fixed by his own 
deep-seated contempt for the complacency of the 
plebs. But he was bound soon to part company 
with the grandmaster of pessimism, because he 
discovered the root of the philosophy of renuncia- 
tion in that same detestable debility of the will 
which he deemed responsible for the bovine lassi- 
tude of the masses; both pessimism and philistin- 
ism came from a lack of vitality, and were symp- 
toms of racial degeneracy. But before Nietzsche 
finally rejected Schopenhauer and gave his shock- 
ing counterblast to the undermining action of pes- 
[124] 



Friedrich Nietzsche 

simism, he succumbed temporarily to the spell of 
another gigantic personality. We are not con- 
cerned with Richard Wagner's musical influence 
upon Nietzsche, who was himself a musician of no 
mean ability; what is to the point here is the 
prime principle of Wagner's art theory. The key 
to the Wagnerian theory is found, also, in Scho- 
penhauer's philosophy. Wagner starts from the 
pessimistic thesis that at the bottom of the well of 
life lies nothing but suffering, — hence living is ut- 
terly undesirable. In one of his letters to Franz 
Liszt he names as the duplex root of his creative 
genius the longing for love and the yearning for 
death. On another occasion, he confesses his own 
emotional nihilism in the following summary of 
Tristan und Isolde: "Sehnsucht, Sehnsucht, un- 
stillbares, ewig neu sich gebdrendes Verlangen — 
Schmachten und Dursten; einzige Erlosung: Tod, 
Sterben, Untergehen, — Nichtmehrerwachen." 1 
But from the boundless ocean of sorrow there is 
a refuge. It was Wagner's fundamental dogma 
that through the illusions of art the individual is 
enabled to rise above the hopelessness of the reali- 
ties into a new cosmos replete with supreme satis- 

1 "Longing, longing, unquenchable desire, reproducing itself 
forever anew — thirst and drought; sole deliverance: death, dis- 
solution, extinction, — and no awaking." 

[125] 



Prophets of Dissent 

factions. Man's mundane salvation therefore de- 
pends upon the ministrations of art and his own 
artistic sensitiveness. The glorification of genius 
is a natural corollary of such a belief. 

Nietzsche in one of his earliest works examines 
Wagner's theory and amplifies it by a rather casu- 
istic interpretation of the evolution of art. After 
raising the question, How did the Greeks contrive 
to dignify and ennoble their national existence? 
he points, by way of an illustrative answer, not 
perchance to the Periclean era, but to a far more 
primitive epoch of Hellenic culture, when a total 
oblivion of the actual world and a transport into 
the realm of imagination was universally possi- 
ble. He explains the trance as the effect of intoxi- 
cation, — primarily in the current literal sense of 
the word. Such was the significance of the cult of 
Dionysos. "Through singing and dancing," claims 
Nietzsche, "man manifests himself as member of 
a higher community. Walking and talking he has 
unlearned, and is in a fair way to dance up into 
the air." That this supposititious Dionysiac phase 
of Hellenic culture was in turn succeeded by more 
rational stages, in which the impulsive flow of life 
was curbed and dammed in by operations of the 
intellect, is not permitted by Nietzsche to invali- 

[126] 



Friedrich Nietzsche 

date the argument. By his arbitrary reading of 
ancient history he was, at first, disposed to look to 
the forthcoming Universal-Kunstwerk 1 as the 
complete expression of a new religious spirit and 
as the adequate lever of a general uplift of man- 
kind to a state of bliss. But the typical disparity 
between Wagner and Nietzsche was bound to 
alienate them. Wagner, despite all appearance to 
the contrary, is inherently democratic in his con- 
victions, — his earlier political vicissitudes amply 
confirm this view, — and fastens his hope for the 
elevation of humanity through art upon the sort 
of genius in whom latent popular forces might 
combine to a new summit. Nietzsche on the other 
hand represents the extreme aristocratic type, both 
in respect of thought and of sentiment. "I do not 
wish to be confounded with and mistaken for these 
preachers of equality," says he. "For within me 
justice saith: men are not equal." His ideal is 
a hero of coercive personality, dwelling aloft in 
solitude, despotically bending the gregarious in- 
stincts of the common crowd to his own higher 
purposes by the dominating force of his Will to 
Might. 

The concept of the Overman rests, as has been 

1 Work of all arts. 

[I2 7 ] 



Prophets of Dissent 

shown, upon a fairly solid substructure of plausi- 
bility, since at the bottom of the author's reason- 
ing lies the notion that mankind is destined to out- 
grow its current status; the thought of a humanity 
risen to new and wondrous heights of power over 
nature is not necessarily unscientific for being su- 
premely imaginative. The Overman, however, 
cannot be produced ready made, by any instan- 
taneous process ; he must be slowly and persistently 
willed into being, through love of the new ideal 
which he is to embody: "All great Love," speak- 
eth Zarathustra, "seeketh to create what it loveth. 
Myself I sacrifice into my love, and my neighbor 
as myself, thus runneth the speech of all creators." 
Only the fixed conjoint purpose of many genera- 
tions of aspiring men will be able to create the 
Overman. "Could you create a God? — Then be 
silent concerning all gods ! But ye could very well 
create Beyond-man. Not yourselves perhaps, my 
brethren! But ye could create yourselves into 
fathers and fore-fathers of Beyond-man; and let 
this be your best creating. But all creators are 
hard." " 

Nietzsche's startlingly heterodox code of ethics 
coheres organically with the Overman hypothesis, 
and so understood is certain to lose some of its 

. [128] 



Friedrich Nietzsche 

aspect of absurdity. The racial will, as we have 
seen, must be taught to aim at the Overman. But 
the volitional faculty of the generation, according 
to Nietzsche, is so debilitated as to be utterly in- 
adequate to its office. Hence, advisedly to stimu- 
late and strengthen the enfeebled will power of his 
fellow men is the most imperative and immediate 
task of the radical reformer. Once the power of 
willing, as such, shall have been, — regardless of 
the worthiness of its object, — brought back to ac- 
tive life, it will be feasible to give the Will to 
Might a direction towards objects of the highest 
moral grandeur. 

Unfortunately for the race as a whole, the 
throng is ineligible for partnership in the auspi- 
cious scheme of co-operative procreation; which 
fact necessitates a segregative method of breeding. 
The Overman can only be evolved by an ancestry 
of master-men, who must be secured to the race 
by a rigid application of eugenic standards, par- 
ticularly in the matter of mating. Of marriage, 
Nietzsche has this definition: "Marriage, so call 
I the will of two to create one who is more than 
they who created him." For the bracing of the 
weakened will-force of the human breed it is abso- 
lutely essential that master-men, the potential pro- 
[129] 



Prophets of Dissent 

genitors of the superman, be left unhampered to 
the impulse of "living themselves out" (sich auszu- 
leben), — an opportunity of which under the reg- 
nant code of morals they are inconsiderately de- 
prived. Since, then, existing dictates and conven- 
tions are a serious hindrance to the requisite au- 
tonomy of the master-man, their abolishment 
might be well. Yet on the other hand, it is con- 
venient that the Vielzuviele, the "much-too- 
many," i. e. the despised generality of people, 
should continue to be governed and controlled by 
strict rules and regulations, so that the will of the 
master-folk might the more expeditiously be 
wrought. Would it not, then, be an efficacious 
compromise to keep the canon of morality in force 
for the general run, but suspend it for the special 
benefit of master-men, prospective or full-fledged? 
From the history of the race Nietzsche draws a 
warrant for the distinction. His contention is that 
masters and slaves have never lived up to a single 
code of conduct. Have not civilizations risen and 
fallen according as they were shaped by this 
or that class of nations? History also teaches 
what disastrous consequences follow the loss of 
caste. In the case of the Jewish people, the 
domineering type or morals gave way to the servile 
[130] 



Friedrich Nietzsche 

as a result of the Babylonian captivity. So long 
as the Jews were strong, they extolled all mani- 
festations of strength and energy. The collapse 
of their own strength turned them into apologists 
of the so-called "virtues" of humility, long-suffer- 
ing, forgiveness, — until, according to the Judaeo- 
Christian code of ethics, being good came to mean 
being weak. So races may justly be classified into 
masters and slaves, and history proves that to the 
strong goes the empire. The ambitions of a na- 
tion are a sure criterion of its worth. 

"I walk through these folk and keep mine eyes open. 
They have become smaller and are becoming ever smaller. 
And the reason of that is their doctrine of happiness and 
virtue. 

For they are modest even in their virtue; for they are 
desirous of ease. But with ease only modest virtue is 
compatible. 

True, in their fashion they learn how to stride and to 
stride forward. That I call their hobbling. Thereby 
they become an offense unto every one who is in a hurry. 

And many a one strideth on and in doing so looketh 
backward, with a stiffened neck. I rejoice to run against 
the stomachs of such. 

Foot and eyes shall not lie, nor reproach each other 
for lying. But there is much lying among small folk. 

Some of them will, but most of them are willed merely. 
Some of them are genuine, but most of them are bad 
actors. 

There are unconscious actors among them, and involun- 

[13O 



Prophets of Dissent 

tary actors. The genuine are always rare, especially 
genuine actors. 

Here is little of man; therefore women try to make 
themselves manly. For only he who is enough of a man 
will save the woman in woman. 

And this hypocrisy I found to be worst among them, 
that even those who command feign the virtues of those 
who serve. 

'I serve, thou servest, we serve.' Thus the hypocrisy 
of the rulers prayeth. And, alas, if the highest lord be 
merely the highest servant! 

Alas! the curiosity of mine eye strayed even unto their 
hypocrisies, and well I divined all their fly-happiness and 
their humming round window panes in the sunshine. 

So much kindness, so much weakness see I. So much 
justice and sympathy, so much weakness. 

Round, honest, and kind are they towards each other, 
as grains of sand are round, honest, and kind unto grains 
of sand. 

Modestly to embrace a small happiness — they call 'sub- 
mission'! And therewith they modestly look sideways 
after a new small happiness. 

At bottom they desire plainly one thing most of all: 
to be hurt by nobody. Thus they oblige all and do well 
unto them. 

But this is cowardice; although it be called Virtue.' 

And if once they speak harshly, these small folk, — I 
hear therein merely their hoarseness. For every draught 
of air maketh them hoarse. 

Prudent are they; their virtues have prudent fingers. 
But they are lacking in clenched fists; their fingers know 
not how to hide themselves behind fists. 

For them virtue is what maketh modest and tame. 
Thereby they have made the wolf a dog and man him- 
self man's best domestic animal. 

'We put our chair in the midst' — thus saith their 

[132] 



Friedrich Nietzsche 

simpering unto me — 'exactly as far from dying gladia- 
tors as from happy swine.' 

This is mediocrity; although it be called moderation." * 

The only law acknowledged by him who would 
be a master is the bidding of his own will. He 
makes short work of every other law. Whatever 
clogs the flight of his indomitable ambition must 
be ruthlessly swept aside. Obviously, the enact- 
ment of this law that would render the individual 
supreme and absolute would strike the death-knell 
for all established forms and institutions of the 
social body. But such is quite within Nietzsche's 
intention. They are noxious agencies, ingeniously 
devised for the enslavement of the will, and the 
most pernicious among them is the Christian re- 
ligion, because of the alleged divine sanction con- 
ferred by it upon subserviency. Christianity 
would thwart the supreme will of nature by curb- 
ing that lust for domination which the laws of 
nature as revealed by science sanction, nay pre- 
scribe. Nietzsche's ideas on this subject are loudly 
and over-loudly voiced in Der Antichrist ("The 
Anti-Christ"), written in September 1888 as the 
first part of a planned treatise in four instalments, 
entitled Der Wille zur Macht. Versuch einer 

1 "Thus Spake Zarathustra," pp. 243-245. 
[133] 



Prophets of Dissent 

Umwertung aller Werte. ("The Will to Power. 
An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values".) 



The master-man's will, then, is his only law. 
That is the essence of Herrenmoral. And so the 
question arises, Whence shall the conscience of the 
ruler-man derive its distinctions between the Right 
and the Wrong? The arch-iconoclast brusquely 
stifles this naive query beforehand by assuring us 
that such distinctions in their accepted sense do 
not exist for personages of that grander stamp. 
Heedless of the time-hallowed concepts that all 
men share in common, he enjoins mastermen to 
take their position uncompromisingly outside the 
confining area of conventions, in the moral inde- 
pendence that dwells "beyond good and evil." 
Good and Evil are mere denotations, devoid of 
any real significance. Right and Wrong are not 
ideals immutable through the ages, nor even the 
same at any time in all states of society. They 
are vague and general notions, varying more or 
less with the practical exigencies under which they 
were conceived. What was right for my great- 
grandfather is not ipso facto right for myself. 
Hence, the older and better established a law, the 
more inapposite is it apt to be to the living de- 

[134] 



Friedrich Nietzsche 

mands. Why should the ruler-man bow down to 
outworn statutes or stultify his self-dependent 
moral sense before the artificial and stupidly uni- 
form moral relics of the dead past? Good is 
whatever conduces to the increase of my power, — 
evil is whatever tends to diminish it ! Only the 
weakling and the hypocrite will disagree. 

Unmistakably this is a straightout applica- 
tion of the "pragmatic" criterion of truth. Nietz- 
sche's unconfessed and cautious imitators, who 
call themselves pragmatists, are not bold enough 
to follow their own logic from the cognitive sphere 
to the moral. They stop short of the natural 
conclusion to which their own premises lead. Mo- 
rality is necessarily predicated upon specific no- 
tions of truth. So if Truth is an alterable and 
shifting concept, must not morality likewise be 
variable ? The pragmatist might just as well come 
out at once into the broad light and frankly say: 
u Laws do not interest me in the abstract, or for 
the sake of their general beneficence; they interest 
me only in so far as they affect me. Therefore I 
will make, interpret, and abolish them to suit my- 
self." 

To Nietzsche the "quest of truth" is a palpable 
evasion. Truth is merely a means for the en- 

[135] 



Prophets of Dissent 

hancement of my subjective satisfaction. It makes 
not a whit of difference whether an opinion or a 
judgment satisfies this or that scholastic defini- 
tion. I call true and good that which furthers 
my welfare and intensifies my joy in living; and, — 
to vindicate my self-gratification as a form, indeed 
the highest, of "social service," — the desirable 
thing is that which matters for the improvement 
of the human stock and thereby speeds the advent 
of the Superman. "Oh," exclaims Zarathustra, 
"that ye would understand my word: Be sure to 
do whatever ye like, — but first of all be such as 
can will! Be sure to love your neighbor as your- 
self, — but first of all be such as love themselves, — 
as love themselves with great love, with contempt. 
Thus speaketh Zarathustra, the ungodly." 

By way of throwing some light upon this phase 
of Nietzsche's moral philosophy, it may be added 
that ever since 1876 he was an assiduous student 
of Herbert Spencer, with whose theory of social 
evolution he was first made acquainted by his 
friend, Paul Ree, who in two works of his own, 
"Psychologic Observations," (1875), and "On 
the Origin of Moral Sentiments," (1877), had 
elaborated upon the Spencerian theory about the 
genealogy of morals. 

[136] 



Friedrich Nietzsche 

The best known among all of Nietzsche's works, 
Also Sprach Zarathustra ("Thus Spake Zarathus- 
tra"), is the Magna Charta of the new moral 
emancipation. It was composed during a sojourn 
in southern climes between 1883 and 1885, during 
the convalescence from a nervous collapse, when 
after a long and critical depression his spirit was 
recovering its accustomed resilience. Nietzsche 
wrote his magnum opus in solitude, in the moun- 
tains and by the sea. His mind always was at its 
best in settings of vast proportions, and in this 
particular work there breathes an exaltation that 
has scarcely its equal in the world's literature. 
Style and diction in their supreme elation suit the 
lofty fervor of the sentiment. From the feelings, 
as a fact, this great rhapsody flows, and to the 
feelings it makes its appeal ; its extreme fascination 
must be lost upon those who only know how to 
"listen to reason." The wondrous plastic beauty 
of the language, along with the high emotional 
pitch of its message, render "Zarathustra" a price- 
less poetic monument; indeed its practical effect 
in chastening and rejuvenating German literary 
diction can hardly be overestimated. Its value as 
a philosophic document is much slighter. It is 
not even organized on severely logical lines. On 
[137] 



Prophets of Dissent 

the contrary, the four component parts are but 
brilliant variations upon a single generic theme, 
each in a different clef, but harmoniously united 
by the incremental ecstasy of the movement. The 
composition is free from monotony, for down to 
each separate aphorism every part of it has its 
special lyric nuance. The whole purports to 
convey in the form of discourse the prophetic 
message of Zarathustra, the hermit sage, an ideal- 
ized self-portrayal of the author. 

In the first book the tone is calm and temper- 
ate. Zarathustra exhorts and instructs his dis- 
ciples, rails at his adversaries, and discloses his 
superiority over them. In the soliloquies and dia- 
logues of the second book he reveals himself more 
fully and freely as the Superman. The third book 
contains the meditations and rhapsodies of Zara- 
thustra now dwelling wholly apart from men, his 
mind solely occupied with thought about the 
Eternal Return of the Present. In the fourth book 
he is found in the company of a few chosen spirits 
whom he seeks to imbue with his perfected doc- 
trine. In this final section of the work the deep 
lyric current is already on the ebb; it is largely 
supplanted by irony, satire, sarcasm, even buffoon- 
ery, all of which are resorted to for the pitiless 

[138] 



Friedrich Nietzsche 

excoriation of our type of humanity, deemed de- 
crepit by the Sage. The author's intention to 
present in a concluding fifth division the dying 
Zarathustra pronouncing his benedictions upon 
life in the act of quitting it was not to bear fruit. 
"Zarathustra"' — Nietzsche's terrific assault 
upon the fortifications of our social structure — is 
too easily mistaken by facile cavilers for the rav- 
ings of an unsound and desperate mind. To a nar- 
row and superficial reading, it exhibits itself as a 
wholesale repudiation of all moral responsibility 
and a maniacal attempt to subvert human civiliza- 
tion for the exclusive benefit of the "glorious 
blonde brute, rampant with greed for victory and 
spoil." Yet those who care to look more deeply 
will detect beneath this chimerical contempt of 
conventional regulations no want of a highminded 
philanthropic purpose, provided they have the vis- 
ion necessary to comprehend a love of man orient- 
ed by such extremely distant perspectives. At all 
events they will discover that in this rebellious 
propaganda an advancing line of life is firmly 
traced out. The indolent and thoughtless may in- 
deed be horrified by the appalling dangers of the 
gospel according to Zarathustra. But in reality 
there is no great cause for alarm. Society may 
[139] 



Prophets of Dissent 

amply rely upon its agencies, even in these stu- 
pendous times of universal war, for protection 
from any disastrous organic dislocations incited 
by the teachings of Zarathustra, at least so far as 
the immediate future is concerned — in which alone 
society appears to be interested. Moreover, our 
apprehensions are appeased by the sober reflection 
that by its plain unfeasibleness the whole super- 
social scheme of Nietzsche is reduced to colossal 
absurdity. Its limitless audacity defeats any for- 
mulation of its "war aims." For what compels 
an ambitious imagination to arrest itself at the 
goal of the superman? Why should it not run on 
beyond that first terminal? In one of Mr. G. K. 
Chesterton's labored extravaganzas a grotesque 
sort of super-overman in spe succeeds in going be- 
yond unreason when he contrives this lucid self- 
definition: "I have gone where God has never 
dared to go. I am above the silly supermen as 
they are above mere men. Where I walk in the 
Heavens, no man has walked before me, and I 
am alone in a garden." It is enough to make one 
gasp and then perhaps luckily recall Goethe's con- 
soling thought that under the care of Providence 
the trees will not grow into the heavens. ("Es ist 
dafiir gesorgt, dass die B'dume nicht in den Him- 
[140] 



Friedrich Nietzsche 

mel wachsen.") As matter of fact, the ideas pro- 
mulgated in Also Sprach Zarathustra need inspire 
no fear of their winning the human race from its 
venerable idols, despite the fact that the pull of 
natural laws and of elemental appetites seems to 
be on their side. The only effect to be expected 
of such a philosophy is that it will act as an anti- 
dote for moral inertia which inevitably goes with 
the flock-instinct and the lazy reliance on the ac- 
customed order of things. 

Nietzsche's ethics are not easy to valuate, since 
none of their standards are derived from the or- 
thodox canon. His being a truly personalized 
form of morality, his principles are strictly cognate 
to his temperament. To his professed ideals 
there attaches a definite theory of society. And 
since his philosophy is consistent in its sincerity, 
its message is withheld from the man-in-the-street, 
deemed unworthy of notice, and delivered only to 
the elite that shall beget the superman. To 
Nietzsche the good of the greatest number is no 
valid consideration. The great stupid mass exists 
only for the sake of an oligarchy by whom it is 
duly exploited under nature's decree that the 
strong shall prey upon the weak. Let, then, this 
favored set further the design of nature by sys- 

[mi] 



Prophets of Dissent 

tematically encouraging the elevation of their own 
type. __^__ 

We have sought to dispel the fiction about the 
shaping influence of Nietzsche upon the thought 
and conduct of his nation, and have accounted for 
the miscarriage of his ethics by their fantastic 
impracticability. Yet it has been shown also that 
he fostered in an unmistakable fashion the class- 
consciousness of the aristocrat, born or self-ap- 
pointed. To that extent his influence was cer- 
tainly malign. Yet doubtless he did perform a 
service to our age. The specific nature of this 
service, stated in the fewest words, is that to his 
great divinatory gift are we indebted for an un- 
precedented strengthening of our hold upon real- 
ity. In order to make this point clear we have to 
revert once more to Nietzsche's transient intel- 
lectual relation to pessimism. 

We have seen that the illusionism of Schopen- 
hauer and more particularly of Wagner exerted a 
strong attraction on his high-strung artistic tem- 
perament. 

Nevertheless a certain realistic counter-drift to 
the ultra-romantic tendency of Wagner's theory 
caused him in the long run to reject the faith in 

[142] 



Friedrich Nietzsche 

the power of Art to save man from evil. Almost 
abruptly, his personal affection for the "Master," 
to whom in his eventual mental eclipse he still 
referred tenderly at lucid moments, changed to 
bitter hostility. Henceforth he classes the glori- 
fication of Art as one of the three most despicable 
attitudes of life : Philistinism, Pietism, and Es- 
theticism, all of which have their origin in cow- 
ardice, represent three branches of the ignomin- 
ious road of escape from the terrors of living. In 
three extended diatribes Nietzsche denounces 
Wagner as the archetype of modern decadence; 
the most violent attack of all is delivered against 
the point of juncture in which Wagner's art gospel 
and the Christian religion culminate : the promise 
of redemption through pity. To Nietzsche's way 
of thinking pity is merely the coward's acknowl- 
edgment of his weakness. For only insomuch as a 
man is devoid of fortitude in bearing his own suf- 
ferings is he unable to contemplate with equanim- 
ity the sufferings of his fellow creatures. Since 
religion enjoins compassion with all forms of hu- 
man misery, we should make war upon religion. 
And for the reason that Wagner's crowning 
achievement, his Parsifal, is a veritable sublima- 
tion of Mercy, there can be no truce between its 

[143] 



Prophets of Dissent 

creator and the giver of the counsel : "Be hard I" 
Perhaps this notorious advice is after all not as 
ominous as it sounds. It merely expresses rather 
abruptly Nietzsche's confidence in the value of self- 
control as a means of discipline. If you have 
learned calmly to see others suffer, you are your- 
self able to endure distress with manful compo- 
sure. "Therefore I wash the hand which helped 
the sufferer; therefore I even wipe my soul." But, 
unfortunately, such is the frailty of human nature 
that it is only one step from indifference about the 
sufferings of others to an inclination to exploit 
them or even to inflict pain upon one's neighbors 
for the sake of personal gain of one sort or an- 
other. 

Why so hard? said once the charcoal unto the dia- 
mond, are we not near relations? 

Why so soft? O my brethren, thus I ask you. Are 
ye not my brethren ? 

Why so soft, so unresisting, and yielding? Why is 
there so much disavowal and abnegation in your hearts? 
Why is there so little fate in your looks? 

And if ye are not willing to be fates, and inexorable, 
how could ye conquer with me someday? 

And if your hardness would not glance, and cut, and 
chip into pieces — how could ye create with me some 
day? 

For all creators are hard. And it must seem blessed- 
ness unto you to press your hand upon millenniums as 
upon wax, — 

[144] 



Friedrich Nietzsche 

Blessedness to write upon the will of millenniums as 
upon brass, — harder than brass, nobler than brass. The 
noblest only is perfectly hard. 

This new table, O my brethren, I put over you: Be- 
come hard ! * 

The repudiation of Wagner leaves a tremen- 
dous void in Nietzsche's soul by depriving his en- 
thusiasm of its foremost concrete object. He loses 
his faith in idealism. When illusions can bring a 
man like Wagner to such an odious outlook upon 
life, they must be obnoxious in themselves; and 
so, after being subjected to pitiless analysis, they 
are disowned and turned into ridicule. And now, 
the pendulum of his zeal having swung from one 
emotional extreme to the other, the great rhap- 
sodist finds himself temporarily destitute of an 
adequate theme. However, his fervor does not 
long remain in abeyance, and soon it is absorbed 
in a new object. Great as is the move it is logical 
enough. Since illusions are only a hindrance to 
the fuller grasp of life which behooves all free 
spirits, Nietzsche energetically turns from self- 
deception to its opposite, self-realization. In this 
new spiritual endeavor he relies far more on intui- 
tion than on scientific and metaphysical specula- 
tion. From his own stand he is certainly justified 

1 "Thus Spake Zarathustra," p. 399, sec. 29. 

[145] 



Prophets of Dissent 

in doing this. Experimentation and ratiocination 
at the best are apt to disassociate individual reali- 
ties from their complex setting and then proceed 
to palm them off as illustrations of life, when in 
truth they are lifeless, artificially preserved speci- 
mens. 

"Encheiresin naturae nennt's die Chemie, 
Spottet ihrer selbst und weiss nicht wie." 1 

Nietzsche's realism, by contrast, goes to the very 
quick of nature, grasps all the gifts of life, and 
from the continuous flood of phenomena extracts 
a rich, full-flavored essence. It is from a sense of 
gratitude for this boon that he becomes an idola- 
trous worshiper of experience, "der grosse Jasa- 
ger" — the great sayer of Yes, — and the most 
stimulating optimist of all ages. To Nietzsche 
reality is alive as perhaps never to man before. 
He plunges down to the very heart of things, ab- 
sorbs their vital qualities and meanings, and hav- 
ing himself learned to draw supreme satisfaction 
from the most ordinary facts and events, he makes 
the common marvelous to others, which, as was 
said by James Russell Lowell, is a true test of 

Goethe's Faust, II, 11. 1940-1. Bayard Taylor translates: En- 
cheiresin naturae, this Chemistry names, nor knows how herself 
she banters and blames! 

[146] 



Friedrich Nietzsche 

genius. No wonder that deification of reality 
becomes the dominant motif in his philosophy. 
But again that onesided aristocratic strain per- 
verts his ethics. To drain the intoxicating cup 
at the feast of life, such is the divine privilege not 
of the common run of mortals but only of the elect. 
They must not let this or that petty and artificial 
convention, nor yet this or that moral command 
or prohibition, restrain them from the exercise 
of that higher sense of living, but must fully aban- 
don themselves to its joys. "Since man came into 
existence he hath had too little joy. That alone, 
my brethren, is our original sin." 1 The "much- 
too-many" are doomed to inanity by their lack of 
appetite at the banquet of life: 

Such folk sit down unto dinner and bring nothing with 
them, not even a good hunger. And now they backbite: 
"All is vanity!" 

But to eat well and drink well, O my brethren, is, 
verily, no vain art ! Break, break the tables of those who 
are never joyful! 2 

The Will to Live holds man's one chance of 
this-worldly bliss, and supersedes any care for the 
remote felicities of any problematic future state. 
Yet the Nietzschean cult of life is not to be under- 

1 "Thus Spake Zarathustra," p. 120. 
*Ibid., p. 296, sec. 13. 

[147] 



Prophets of Dissent 

stood by any means as a banal devotion to the 
pleasurable side of life alone. The true disciple 
finds in every event, be it happy or adverse, ex- 
alting or crushing, the factors of supreme" spiritual 
satisfaction: joy and pain are equally implied in 
experience, the Will to Live encompasses jointly 
the capacity to enjoy and to suffer. It may even 
be paradoxically said that since man owes some 
of his greatest and most beautiful achievements 
to sorrow, it must be a joy and a blessing to suf- 
fer. The unmistakable sign of heroism is amor 
fatly a fierce delight in one's destiny, hold what it 
may. 

Consequently, the precursor of the superman 
will be possessed, along with his great sensibility 
to pleasure, of a capacious aptitude for suffering. 
"Ye would perchance abolish suffering," exclaims 
Nietzsche, "and we, — it seems that we would 
rather have it even greater and worse than it has 
ever been. The discipline of suffering, — tragical 
suffering, — know ye not that only this discipline 
has heretofore brought about every elevation of 
man?" "Spirit is that life which cutteth into life. 
By one's own pain one's own knowledge in- 
creaseth; — knew ye that before? And the happi- 
ness of the spirit is this: to be anointed and con- 
[148] 



Friedrich Nietzsche 

secrated by tears as a sacrificial animal; — knew 
ye that before?" And if, then, the tragical pain 
inherent in life be no argument against Joyfulness, 
the zest of living can be obscured by nothing save 
the fear of total extinction. To the disciple of 
Nietzsche, by whom every moment of his exist- 
ence is realized as a priceless gift, the thought of 
his irrevocable separation from all things is un- 
bearable. " Was this life?' I shall say to Death. 
'Well, then, once more!' " And — to paraphrase 
Nietzsche's own simile — the insatiable witness of 
the great tragi-comedy, spectator and partici- 
pant at once, being loath to leave the theatre, and 
eager for a repetition of the performance, shouts 
his endless encore, praying fervently that in the 
constant repetition of the performance not a sin- 
gle detail of the action be omitted. The yearning 
for the endlessness not of life at large, not of life 
on any terms, but of this my life with its ineffable 
wealth of rapturous moments, works up the ex- 
treme optimism of Nietzsche to its stupendous 
a priori notion of infinity, expressed in the name 
die ewige Wiederkehr ("Eternal Recurrence"). 
It is a staggeringly imaginative concept, formed 
apart from any evidential grounds, and yet forti- 
fied with a fair amount of logical armament. The 

[149] 



Prophets of Dissent 

universe is imagined as endless in time, although 
its material contents are not equally conceived as 
limitless. Since, consequently, there must be a 
limit to the possible variety in the arrangement 
and sequence of the sum total of data, even as in 
the case of a kaleidoscope, the possibility of varie- 
gations is not infinite. The particular co-ordina- 
tion of things in the universe, say at this particular 
moment, is bound to recur again and again in the 
passing of the eons. But under the nexus of cause 
and effect the resurgence of the past from the 
ocean of time is not accidental nor is the configura- 
tion of things haphazard, as is true in the case of 
the kaleidoscope; rather, history, in the most in- 
clusive acceptation of the term, is predestined to 
repeat itself; this happens through the perpetual 
progressive resurrection of its particles. It is then 
to be assumed that any aspect which the world has 
ever presented must have existed innumerable mil- 
lions of times before, and must recur with eternal 
periodicity. That the deterministic strain in this 
tremendous Vorstellung of a cyclic rhythm throb- 
bing in the universe entangles its author's fanatical 
belief in evolution in a rather serious self-contra- 
diction, does not detract from its spiritual lure, 
[ISO] 



Friedrich Nietzsche 

nor from its wide suggestiveness, however incapa- 
ble it may be of scientific demonstration. 

From unfathomed depths of feeling wells up 
the paean of the prophet of the life intense. 

O Mensch! Gib Acht! 

Was spricht die tiefe Mitternacht? 

Ich schlief, ich schlief — , 

Aus tiefem Traum bin ich erwacht: — 

Die Welt ist tief, 

Und tiefer als der Tag gedacht. 

Tief ist ihr Weh — , 

Lust — tiefer noch als Herzeleid: 

Weh spricht: Vergeh! 

Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit — 

Will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit ! x 

A timid heart may indeed recoil from the iron 
necessity of reliving ad infinitum its woeful terres- 
trial fate. But the prospect can hold no terror 
for the heroic soul by whose fiat all items of ex- 
perience have assumed important meanings and 

1 O man ! Lose not sight ! 
What saith the deep midnight? 
"I lay in sleep, in sleep; 
From deep dream I woke to light. 
The world is deep, 

And deeper than ever day thought it might. 
Deep is its woe, — 

And deeper still than woe — delight." 
Saith woe: "Pass, go! 
Eternity's sought by all delight, — 
Eternity deep — by all delight. 
"Thus Spake Zarathustra," The Drunken Song, p. 174. — The 
translation but faintly suggests the poetic appeal of the original. 

[151] 



Prophets of Dissent 

values. He who has cast in his lot with Destiny 
in spontaneous submission to all its designs, can- 
not but revere and cherish his own fate as an in- 
tegral part of the grand unalterable fatality of 
things. 

If this crude presentment of Friedrich Nietz- 
sche's doctrine has not entirely failed of its pur- 
pose, the leitmotifs of that doctrine will have been 
readily referred by the reader to their origin; they 
can be subsumed under that temperamental cate- 
gory which is more or less accurately defined as 
the romantic. Glorification of violent passion, — 
quest of innermost mysteries, — boundless expan- 
sion of self-consciousness, — visions of a future of 
transcendent magnificence, and notwithstanding 
an ardent worship of reality a quixotically im- 
practicable detachment from the concrete basis 
of civic life, — these outstanding characteristics of 
the Nietzschean philosophy give unmistakable 
proof of a central, driving, romantic inspiration: 
Nietzsche shifts the essence and principle of being 
to a new center of gravity, by substituting the Fu- 
ture for the Present and relying on the untram- 
meled expansion of spontaneous forces which upon 

[152] 



Friedrich Nietzsche 

closer examination are found to be without definite 
aim or practical goal. 

For this reason, critically to animadvert upon 
Nietzsche as a social reformer would be utterly 
out of place; he is simply too much of a poet to 
be taken seriously as a statesman or politician. 
The weakness of his philosophy before the forum 
of Logic has been referred to before. Nothing 
can be easier than to prove the incompatibility of 
some of his theorems. How, for instance, can the 
absolute determinism of the belief in Cyclic Re- 
currence be reconciled with the power vested in 
superman to deflect by his autonomous will the 
straight course of history? Or, to touch upon a 
more practical social aspect of his teaching, — if 
in the order of nature all men are unequal, how 
can we ever bring about the right selection of 
leaders, how indeed can we expect to secure the 
due ascendancy of character and intellect over the 
gregarious grossness of the demos? 

Again, it is easy enough to controvert Nietzsche 
almost at any pass by demonstrating his unphilo- 
sophic onesidedness. Were Nietzsche not stub- 
bornly onesided, he would surely have conceded — 
as any sane-minded person must concede in these 
times of suffering and sacrifice — that charity, self- 

[153] 



Prophets of Dissent 

abnegation, and self-immolation might be viewed, 
not as conclusive proofs of degeneracy, but on 
the contrary as signs of growth towards perfec- 
tion. Besides, philosophers of the metier are sure 
to object to the haziness of Nietzsche's idea of 
Vitality which in truth is oriented, as is his philoso- 
phy in general, less by thought than by sentiment. 

Notwithstanding his obvious connection with 
significant contemporaneous currents, the author 
of "Zarathustra" is altogether too much sui gen- 
eris to be amenable to any crude and rigid classifi- 
cation. He may plausibly be labelled an anarchist, 
yet no definition of anarchism will wholly take 
him in. Anarchism stands for the demolition of 
the extant social apparatus of restraint. Its bat- 
tle is for the free determination of personal happi- 
ness. Nietzsche's prime concern, contrarily, is 
with internal self-liberation from the obsessive de- 
sire for personal happiness in any accepted con- 
notation of the term ; such happiness to him does 
not constitute the chief object of life. 

The cardinal point of Nietzsche's doctrine is 
missed by those who, arguing retrospectively, ex- 
pound the gist of his philosophy as an incitation 
to barbarism. Nothing can be more remote from 
his intentions than the transformation of society 
[154] 



Friedrich Nietzsche 

into a horde of ferocious brutes. His impeach- 
ment of mercy, notwithstanding an appearance of 
reckless impiety, is in the last analysis no more and 
no less than an expedient in the truly romantic pur- 
suit of a new ideal of Love. Compassion, in his 
opinion, hampers the progress towards forms of 
living that shall be pregnant with a new and su- 
perior type of perfection. And in justice to Nietz- 
sche it should be borne in mind that among the 
various manifestations of that human failing there 
is none he scorns so deeply as cowardly and petty 
commiseration of self. It also deserves to be em- 
phasized that he nowhere endorses selfishness 
when exercised for small or sordid objects. "I 
love the brave. But it is not enough to be a 
swordsman, one must also know against whom to 
use the sword. And often there is more bravery 
in one's keeping quiet and going past, in order to 
spare one's self for a worthier enemy: Ye shall 
have only enemies who are to be hated, but not 
enemies who are to be despised." * Despotism 
must justify itself by great and worthy ends. And 
no man must be permitted to be hard towards 
others who lacks the strength of being even harder 
towards himself. 

1 "Thus Spake Zarathustra," p. 304. 

[155] 



Prophets of Dissent 

At all events it must serve a better purpose to 
appraise the practical importance of Nietzsche's 
speculations than blankly to denounce their im- 
moralism. Nietzsche, it has to be repeated, was 
not on the whole a creator of new ideas. His 
extraordinary influence in the recent past is not 
due to any supreme originality or fertility of mind; 
it is predominantly due to his eagle-winged im- 
agination. In him the emotional urge of utter- 
ance was, accordingly, incomparably more potent 
than the purely intellectual force of opinion: in 
fact the texture of his philosophy is woven of sen- 
sations rather than of ideas, hence its decidedly 
ethical trend. 

The latent value of Nietzsche's ethics in their 
application to specific social problems it would be 
extremely difficult to determine. Their successful 
application to general world problems, if it were 
possible, would mean the ruin of the only form 
of civilization that signifies to us. His philosophy, 
if swallowed in the whole, poisons; in large pota- 
tions, intoxicates; but in reasonable doses, 
strengthens and stimulates. Such danger as it 
harbors has no relation to grossness. His call to 
the Joy of Living and Doing is no encouragement 
of vulgar hedonism, but a challenge to persevering 

[156] 



Friedrich Nietzsche 

effort. He urges the supreme importance of vigor 
of body and mind and force of will. "O my 
brethren, I consecrate you to be, and show unto 
you the way unto a new nobility. Ye shall be- 
come procreators and breeders and sowers of the 
future. — Not whence ye come be your honor in 
future, but whither ye go ! Your will, and your 
foot that longeth to get beyond yourselves, be 
that your new honor!" * 

It would be a withering mistake to advocate the 
translation of Nietzsche's poetic dreams into the 
prose of reality. Unquestionably his Utopia if 
it were to be carried into practice would doom to 
utter extinction the world it is devised to regener- 
ate. But it is generally acknowledged that 
"prophets have a right to be unreasonable," and 
so, if we would square ourselves with Friedrich 
Nietzsche in a spirit of fairness, we ought not to 
forget that the daring champion of reckless unre- 
straint is likewise the inspired apostle of action, 
power, enthusiasm, and aspiration, in fine, a 
prophet of Vitality and a messenger of Hope. 

^'Thus Spake Zarathustra," p. 294. 



[157] 



LEO TOLSTOY 



IV 

THE REVIVALISM OF LEO TOLSTOY 

IN the intellectual record of our times it is one 
of the oddest events that the most impressive 
preacher who has taken the ear of civilized 
mankind in this generation raised up his voice 
in a region which in respect of its political, relig- 
ious, and economic status was until recently, by 
fairly common consent, ruled off the map of Eu- 
rope. The greatest humanitarian of his century 
sprang up in a land chiefly characterized in the 
general judgment of the outside world by the 
reactionism of its government and the stolid 
ignorance of its populace. A country still teeming 
with analphabeticians and proverbial for its dense 
medievalism gave to the world a writer who by 
the great quality of his art and the lofty spiritual- 
ism of his teaching was able not only to obtain a 
wide hearing throughout all civilized countries, 
but to become a distinct factor in the moral evolu- 
tion of the age. The stupefying events that have 
[161] 



Prophets of Dissent 

recently revolutionized the Russian state have 
given the world an inkling of the secrets of the 
Slavic type of temperament, so mystifying in its 
commixture of simplicity and strength on the one 
hand with grossness and stupidity, and on the other 
hand with the highest spirituality and idealism. 
For such people as in these infuriated times still 
keep up some objective and judicious interest in 
products of the literary art, the volcanic upheaval 
in the social life of Russia has probably thrown 
some of Tolstoy's less palpable figures into a 
greater plastic relief. Tolstoy's own character, 
too, has become more tangible in its curious com- 
position. The close analogy between his personal 
theories and the dominant impulses of his race 
has now been made patent. We are better able to 
understand the people of whom he wrote because 
we have come to know better the people for whom 
he wrote. 

The emphasis of Tolstoy's popular appeal was 
unquestionably enhanced by certain eccentricities 
of his doctrine, and still more by his picturesque 
efforts to conform his mode of life, by way of 
necessary example, to his professed theory of 
social elevation. The personality of Tolstoy, like 
the character of the Russian people, is many-sided, 

[162] 



Leo Tolstoy 

and since its aspects are not marked off by con- 
venient lines of division, but are, rather, com- 
mingled in the great and varied mass of his liter- 
ary achievements, it is not easy to make a defini- 
tive forecast of his historic position. Tentatively, 
however, the current critical estimate may be 
summed up in this: as a creative writer, in partic- 
ular of novels and short stories, he stood matchless 
among the realists, and the verdict pronounced 
at one time by William Dean Howells when he 
referred to Tolstoy as "the only living writer of 
perfect fiction" is not likely to be overruled by 
posterity. Nor will competent judges gainsay his 
supreme importance as a critic and moral revivalist 
of society, even though they may be seriously 
disposed to question whether his principles of con- 
duct constitute in their aggregate a canon of much 
practical worth for the needs of the western world. 
As a philosopher or an original thinker, however, 
he will hardly maintain the place accorded him 
by the less discerning among his multitudinous fol- 
lowers, for in his persistent attempt to find a 
new way of understanding life he must be said to 
have signally failed. Wisdom in him was ham- 
pered by Utopian fancies; his dogmas derive from 
idiosyncrasies and lead into absurdities. Then, 

[163] 



Prophets of Dissent 

too, most of his tenets are easily traced to their 
sources: in his vagaries as well as in his noblest 
and soundest aspirations he was merely continuing 
work which others had prepared. 



An objective survey of Tolstoy's work in real- 
istic fiction, in which he ranked supreme, should 
start with the admission that he was by no means 
the first arrival among the Russians in that field. 
Nicholas Gogol, Fedor Dostoievsky, and Ivan 
Turgenieff had the priority by a small margin. 
Of these three powerful novelists, Dostoievsky 
(1821-1881) has probably had an even stronger 
influence upon modern letters than has Tolstoy 
himself. He was one of the earliest writers of 
romance to show the younger generation how to 
found fiction upon deeper psychologic knowledge. 
His greatest proficiency lay, as is apt to be the 
case with writers of a realistic bent, in dealing with 
the darkest side of life. The wretched and out- 
cast portion of humanity yielded to his skill its 
most congenial material. His novels — "Poor 
Folk," (1846), "Memoirs from a Dead House," 
(1862), "Raskolnikoff," (1866), "The Idiot," 
(1868), "The Karamasoffs," (1879) — take the 
reader into company such as had heretofore 

[164] 



Leo Tolstoy 

not gained open entrance to polite literature : 
criminals, defectives, paupers, and prostitutes. 
Yet he did not dwell upon the wretchedness 
of that submerged section of humanity from any 
perverse delight in what is hideous or for the sat- 
isfaction of readers afflicted with morbid curios- 
ity, but from a compelling sense of pity and 
brotherly love. His works are an appeal to char- 
ity. In them, the imperdible grace of the soul 
shines through the ugliest outward disguise to win 
a glance from the habitual indifference of for- 
tune's enfants gates. Dostoievsky preceded Tol- 
stoy in frankly enlisting his talents in the service 
of his outcast brethren. With the same ideal of 
the writer's mission held in steady view, Tolstoy 
turned his attention from the start, and then more 
and more as his work advanced, to the pitiable 
condition of the lower orders of society. It must 
not be forgotten in this connection that his career 
was synchronous with the growth of a social revo- 
lution which, having reached its full force in these 
days, is making Russia over for better or for 
worse, and whose wellsprings Tolstoy helps us to 

fathom. 

For the general grouping of his writings it is 
convenient to follow Tolstoy's own division of his 

[165] 



Prophets of Dissent 

life. His dreamy poetical childhood was suc- 
ceeded by three clearly distinct stages: first, a 
score of years filled up with self-indulgent worldli- 
ness; next, a nearly equal length of time- devoted 
to artistic ambition, earnest meditation, and help- 
ful social work; last, by a more gradual transi- 
tion, the ascetic period, covering a long stretch of 
years given up to religious illumination and to the 
strenuous advocacy of the Simple Life. 

The remarkable spiritual evolution of this great 
man was apparently governed far more by inborn 
tendencies than by the workings of experience. Of 
Tolstoy in his childhood, youth, middle age, and 
senescence we gain trustworthy impressions from 
numerous autobiographical documents, but here 
we shall have to forego anything more than a pass- 
ing reference to the essential facts of his career. 
He was descended from an aristocratic family of 
German stock but domiciled in Russia since the 
fourteenth century. The year of his birth was 
1828, the same as Ibsen's. In youth he was 
bashful, eccentric, and amazingly ill-favored. 
The last-named of these handicaps he outgrew 
but late in life, still later did he get over his 
bashfulness, and his eccentricity never left him. 
His penchant for the infraction of custom nearly 

[166] 



Leo Tolstoy 

put a premature stop to his career when in his 
urchin days he once threw himself from a window 
in an improvised experiment in aerial navigation. 
At the age of fourteen he was much taken up with 
subtile speculations about the most ancient and 
vexing of human problems : the future life, and the 
immortality of the soul. Entering the university 
at fifteen, he devoted himself in the beginning to 
the study of oriental languages, but later on his 
interest shifted to the law. At sixteen he was 
already imbued with the doctrines of Jean Jacques 
Rousseau that were to play such an important role 
in guiding his conduct. In 1846 he passed out of 
the university without a degree, carrying away 
nothing but a lasting regret over his wasted time. 
He went directly to his ancestral estates, with 
the idealistic intention to make the most of 
the opportunity afforded him by the patriarchal 
relationship that existed in Russia between the 
landholder and the adscripts glebae and to im- 
prove the condition of his seven hundred depend- 
ents. His efforts, however, were foredoomed to 
failure, partly through his lack of experience, 
partly also through a certain want of sincerity 
or tenacity of purpose. The experiment in so- 
cial education having abruptly come to its end, 

[167] 



Prophets of Dissent 

the disillusionized reformer threw himself head- 
long into the diversions and dissipations of the 
capital city. In his "Confession" he refers to 
that chapter of his existence as made up wholly 
of sensuality and worldliness. He was inordi- 
nately proud of his noble birth, — at college his in- 
choate apostleship of the universal brotherhood 
of man did not shield him from a general dislike 
on account of his arrogance, — and he cultivated 
the most exclusive social circles of Moscow. He 
freely indulged the love of sports that was to cling 
through life and keep him strong and supple even 
in very old age. (Up to a short time before his 
death he still rode horseback and perhaps none of 
the renunciations exacted by his principles came so 
hard as that of giving up his favorite pastime of 
hunting.) But he also fell into the evil ways of 
gilded youth, soon achieving notoriety as a toper, 
gambler, and courreur des femmes. After a while 
his brother, who was a person of steadier habits 
and who had great influence over him, persuaded 
him to quit his profligate mode of living and to 
join him at his military post. Under the bracing 
effect of the change, the young man's moral ener- 
gies quickly revived. In the wilds of the Caucasus 
he at once grew freer and cleaner; his deep affec- 
[168] 



Leo Tolstoy 

tion for the half-civilized land endeared him both 
to the Cossack natives and the Russian soldiers. 
He entered the army at twenty-three, and from 
November, 1853, up to the fall of Sebastopol in 
the summer of 1855, served in the Crimean cam- 
paign. He entered the famous fortress in No- 
vember, 1854, and was among the last of its 
defenders. The indelible impressions made upon 
his mind by the heroism of his comrades, the aw- 
ful scenes and the appalling suffering he had to 
witness, were responsible then and later for de- 
scriptions as harrowing and as stirring as any that 
the war literature of our own day has produced. 

In the Crimea he made his debut as a writer. 
Among the tales of his martial period the most 
popular and perhaps the most excellent is the one 
called "The Cossacks." Turgenieff pronounced 
it the best short story ever written in Russian, and 
it is surely no undue exaggeration to say of Tol- 
stoy's novelettes in general that in point of tech- 
nical mastery they are unsurpassed. 

Sick at heart over the unending bloodshed in 
the Caucasus the young officer made his way back 
to Petrograd, and here, lionized in the salons 
doubly, for his feats at arms and in letters, he 
seems to have returned, within more temperate 

[169] 



Prophets of Dissent 

limits, to his former style of living. At any rate, 
in his own judgment the ensuing three years were 
utterly wasted. The mental inanity and moral 
corruption all about him swelled his sense of su- 
periority and self-righteousness. The glaring 
humbug and hypocrisy that permeated his social 
environment was, however, more than he could 
long endure. 

Having resigned his officer's commission he 
went abroad in 1857, to Switzerland, Germany, 
and France. The studies and observations made 
in these travels sealed his resolution to settle down 
for good on his domain and to consecrate his life 
to the welfare of his peasants. But a survey of 
the situation found upon his return made him real- 
ize that nothing could be done for the "muzhik" 
without systematic education: therefore, in order 
to prepare himself for efficacious work as a 
teacher, he spent some further time abroad for 
special study, in 1859. After that, the educational 
labor was taken up in full earnest. The lord of 
the land became the schoolmaster of his subjects, 
reenforcing the effect of viva voce teaching by 
means of a periodical published expressly for their 
moral uplift. This work he continued for about 
three years, his hopes of success now rising, now 
[170] 



Leo Tolstoy 

falling, when in a fit of despondency he again 
abandoned his philanthropic efforts. About this 
time, 1862, he married Sophia Andreyevna Behrs, 
the daughter of a Moscow physician. With char- 
acteristic honesty he forced his private diary on 
his fiancee, who was only eighteen, so that she 
might know the full truth about his pre-conjugal 
course of living. 

About the Countess Tolstoy much has been said 
in praise and blame. Let her record speak for 
itself. Of her union with the great novelist thir- 
teen children were born, of whom nine reached an 
adult age. The mother nursed and tended them 
all, with her own hands made their clothes, and 
until they grew to the age of ten supplied to them 
the place of a schoolmistress. It must not be 
inferred from this that her horizon did not extend 
beyond nursery and kitchen, for during the earlier 
years she acted also as her husband's invaluable 
amanuensis. Before the days of the typewriter 
his voluminous manuscripts were all copied by her 
hand, and recopied and revised — in the case of 
"War and Peace" this happened no less than 
seven times, and the novel runs to sixteen hundred 
close-printed pages! — and under her supervision 
his numerous works were not only printed but also 

[171] 



Prophets of Dissent 

published and circulated. Moreover, she man- 
aged his properties, landed, personal, and literary, 
to the incalculable advantage of the family for- 
tune. This end, to be sure, she accomplished by 
conservative and reliable methods of business; for 
while of his literary genius she was the greatest 
admirer, she never was in full accord with his 
communistic notions. And the highest proof of 
all her extraordinary Tiichtigkeit and devotion is 
that by her common sense and tact she was en- 
abled to function for a lifetime as a sort of buf- 
fer between her husband's world-removed dream- 
land existence and the rigid and frigid reality of 
facts. 

Thus Tolstoy's energies were left to go undivid- 
ed into literary production; its amount, as a re- 
sult, was enormous. If all his writings were to be 
collected, including the unpublished manuscripts 
now reposing in the Rumyantzoff Museum, which 
are said to be about equal in quantity to the pub- 
lished works, and if to this collection were added 
his innumerable letters, most of which are of 
very great interest, the complete set of Tolstoy's 
works would run to considerably more than one 
hundred volumes. To discuss all of Tolstoy's 
writings, or even to mention all, is here quite out 
[172] 



Leo Tolstoy 

of the question. All those, however, that seem 
vital for the purpose of a just estimate and char- 
acterization will be touched upon. 



The literary fame of Tolstoy was abundantly 
secured already in the earlier part of his life by 
his numerous short stories and sketches. The 
three remarkable pen pictures of the siege of 
Sebastopol, and tales such as "The Cossacks," 
"Two Hussars," "Polikushka," "The Snow- 
storm," "The Encounter," "The Invasion," "The 
Captive in the Caucasus," "Lucerne," "Albert," 
and many others, revealed together with an ex- 
ceptional depth of insight an extraordinary plastic 
ability and skill of motivation; in fact they de- 
serve to be set as permanent examples before the 
eyes of every aspiring author. In their characters 
and their setting they present true and racy pic- 
tures of a portentous epoch, intimate studies of 
the human soul that are full of charm and fascina- 
tion, notwithstanding their tragic sadness of out- 
look. Manifestly this author was a prose poet of 
such marvelous power that he could abstain con- 
sistently from the use of sweeping color, over- 
wrought sentiment, and high rhetorical invective. 

At this season Tolstoy, while he refrained from 

[173] 



Prophets of Dissent 

following any of the approved literary models, 
was paying much attention to the artistic refine- 
ment of his style. There was to be a time when 
he would abjure all considerations of artistry on 
the ground that by them the ethical issue in a nar- 
ration is beclouded. But it would be truer to say 
conversely that in his own later works, since "Anna 
Karenina," the clarity of the artistic design was 
dimmed by the obstrusive didactic purpose. For- 
tunately the artistic interest was not yet wholly 
subordinated to the religious urge while the three 
great novels were in course of composition: "War 
and Peace," (1864-69), "Anna Karenina," (first 
part, 1873; published complete in 1877), and 
"Resurrection," (1899). To the first of these is 
usually accorded the highest place among all of 
Tolstoy's works; it is by this work that he takes 
his position as the chief epic poet of modern times. 
"War and Peace" is indeed an epic rather than 
a novel in the ordinary meaning. Playing against 
the background of tremendous historical transac- 
tions, the narrative sustains the epic character not 
only in the hugeness of its dimensions, but equally 
in the qualities of its technique. There is very lit- 
tle comment by the author upon the events, and 
merely a touch of subjective irony here and 

[174] 



Leo Tolstoy 

there. The story is straightforwardly told as it 
was lived out by its characters. Tolstoy has not 
the self-complacency to thrust in the odds and ends 
of his personal philosophy, as is done so annoying- 
ly even by a writer of George Meredith's conse- 
quence, nor does he ever treat his readers with the 
almost simian impertinence so successfully affected 
by a Bernard Shaw. If "War and Peace" has any 
faults, they are the faults of its virtues, and 
spring mainly from an unmeasured prodigality of 
the creative gift. As a result of Tolstoy's exces- 
sive range of vision, the orderly progress of events 
in that great novel is broken up somewhat by the 
profusion of shapes that monopolize the attention 
one at a time much as individual spots in a land- 
scape do under the sweeping glare of the search- 
light. Yet although in the externalization of this 
crowding multitude of figures no necessary detail 
is lacking, the grand movement as a whole is not 
swamped by the details. The entire story is gov- 
erned by the conception of events as an emanation 
of the cosmic will, not merely as the consequence 
of impulses proceeding from a few puissant gen- 
iuses of the Napoleonic order. 

It is quite in accord with such a view of history 
that the machinery of this voluminous epopee 
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Prophets of Dissent 

is not set in motion by a single conspicuous pro- 
tagonist. As a matter of fact, it is somewhat baf- 
fling to try to name the principals in the story, 
since in artistic importance all the figures are on 
an equal footing before their maker; possibly the 
fact that Tolstoy's ethical theory embodied the 
most persistent protest ever raised against the 
inequality of social estates proved not insignificant 
for his manner of characterization. Ethical jus- 
tice, however, is carried to an artistic fault, for the 
feelings and reactions of human nature in so many 
diverse individuals lead to an intricacy and subtlety 
of motivation which obscures the organic causes 
through overzeal in making them patent. Any- 
way, Tolstoy authenticates himself in this novel 
as a past master of realism, particularly in his 
utterly convincing depictment of Russian soldier 
life. And as a painter of the battlefield he ranks, 
allowing for the difference of the medium, with 
Vasili Verestschagin at his best. It may be said 
in passing that these two Russian pacifists, by 
their gruesome exposition of the horrors of war, 
aroused more sentiment against warfare than did 
all the spectacular and expensive peace conferences 
inaugurated by the crowned but hollow head of 
their nation, and the splendid declamations of the 

[i 7 6.] 



Leo Tolstoy 

possessors of, or aspirants for, the late Mr. 
Nobel's forty-thousand dollar prize. 

Like all true realists, Tolstoy took great pains 
to inform himself even about the minutiae of his 
subjects, but he never failed, as did in large 
measure Zola in La Debacle, to infuse emotional 
meaning into the static monotony of facts and fig- 
ures. In his strong attachment for his own human 
creatures he is more nearly akin to the idealizing 
or sentimentalizing type of realists, like Daudet, 
Kipling, Hauptmann, than to the downright mat- 
ter-of-fact naturalists such as Zola or Gorki. But 
to classify him at all would be wrong and futile, 
since he was never leagued with literary creeds 
and cliques and always stood aloof from the heat- 
ed theoretical controversies of his time even after 
he had hurled his great inclusive challenge to art. 

"War and Peace" was written in Tolstoy's hap- 
piest epoch, at a time, comparatively speaking, of 
spiritual calm. He had now reached some satis- 
fying convictions in his religious speculations, and 
felt that his personal life was moving up in the 
right direction. His moral change is made plain 
in the contrast between two figures of the story, 
Prince Andrey and Peter Bezukhoff : the am- 
[177] 



Prophets of Dissent 

bitious worldling and the honest seeker after the 
right way. 

In his second great novel, "Anna Karenina," 
the undercurrent of the author's own moral experi- 
ence has a distinctly greater carrying power. It is 
through the earnest idealist, Levine, that Tolstoy 
has recorded his own aspirations. Characteristic- 
ally, he does not make Levine the central figure. 

"Anna Karenina" is undoubtedly far from 
"pleasant" reading, since it is the tragical recital 
of an adulterous love. But the situation, with its 
appalling consequence of sorrow, is seized in its 
fullest psychological depth and by this means 
saved from being in any way offensive. The re- 
lation between the principals is viewed as by no 
means an ordinary liaison. Anna and Vronsky 
are serious-minded, honorable persons, who have 
struggled conscientiously against their mutual en- 
chantment, but are swept out of their own moral 
orbits by the resistless force of Fate. This fatal- 
istic element in the tragedy is variously empha- 
sized; so at the beginning of the story, where 
Anna, in her emotional confusion still half-igno- 
rant of her infatuation, suddenly realizes her love 
for Vronsky; or in the scene at the horse races 
where he meets with an accident. Throughout the 

[178] 



Leo Tolstoy 

narrative the psychological argumentation is be- 
yond criticism. Witness the description of Anna's 
husband, a sort of cousin-in-kind of Ibsen's Thor- 
vald Helmer, reflecting on his future course after 
his wife's confession of her unfaithfulness. Or 
that other episode, perhaps the greatest of them 
all, when Anna, at the point of death, joins to- 
gether the hands of her husband and her lover. 
Or, finally, the picture of Anna as she deserts her 
home leaving her son behind in voluntary expia- 
tion of her wrong-doing, an act, by the way, that 
betrays a nicety of conscience far too subtle for 
the Rhadamantine inquisitors who demand to 
know why, if Anna would atone to Karenin, does 
she go with Vronsky? How perfectly true to life, 
subsequently, is the rapid degringolade of this pas- 
sion under the gnawing curse of the homeless, 
workless, purposeless existence which little by 
little disunites the lovers ! Only the end may be 
somewhat open to doubt, with its metastasis of 
the heroine's character, — unless indeed we con- 
sider the sweeping change accounted for by the 
theory of duplex personality. She herself believes 
that there are two quite different women alive in 
her, the one steadfastly loyal to her obligations, 
Li79] 



Prophets of Dissent 

the other blindly driven into sin by the demon of 
her uncontrollable temperament. 

In the power of analysis, "Anna Karenina" is 
beyond doubt Tolstoy's masterpiece, and yet in 
its many discursive passages it already foreshad- 
ows the disintegration of his art, or more pre- 
cisely, its ultimate capitulation to moral propa- 
gandism. For it was while at work upon this 
great novel that the old perplexities returned to 
bewilder his soul. In the tumultuous agitation of 
his conscience, the crucial and fundamental ques- 
tions, Why Do We Live? and How Should We 
Live? could nevermore be silenced. Now a defin- 
itive attitude toward life is forming; to it all the 
later works bear a vital relation. And so, in re- 
gard to their moral outlook, Tolstoy's books may 
fitly be divided into those written before and those 
written since his "conversion." "Anna Karenina" 
happens to be on the dividing line. 

He was a man well past fifty, of enviable social 
position, in prosperous circumstances, widely cele- 
brated for his art, highly respected for his char- 
acter, and in his domestic life blessed with every 
reason for contentment. Yet all the gifts of for- 
tune sank into insignificance before that vexing, 
unanswered Why? In the face of a paralyzing 
[180] 



Leo Tolstoy 

universal aimlessness, there could be to him no 
abiding sense of life in his personal enjoyments 
and desires. The burden of life became still less 
endurable face to face with the existence of evil 
and with the wretchedness of our social arrange- 
ments. With so much toil and trouble, squalor, 
ignorance, crime, and every conceivable kind of 
bodily and mental suffering all about me, why 
should I be privileged to live in luxury and idle- 
ness? This ever recurring question would not 
permit him to enjoy his possessions without self- 
reproach. To think of thousands of fellowmen 
lacking the very necessaries, made affluence and its 
concomitant ways of living odious to him. We 
know that in 1884, or thereabouts, he radically 
changed his views and modes of life so as to bring 
them into conformity with the laws of the Gospel. 
But before this conversion, in the despairing an- 
guish that attacked him after the completion of 
"Anna Karenina," he was frequently tempted to 
suicide. Although the thought of death was very 
terrible to him then and at all times, still he would 
rather perish than live on in a world made heinous 
and hateful by the iniquity of men. I Then it was 
that he searched for a reason why the vast pro- 
portion of humanity endure life, nay enjoy it, and 

[181] 



Prophets of Dissent 

why self-destruction is condemned by the general 
opinion, and this in spite of the fact that for most 
mortals existence is even harder than it could have 
been for him, since he at least was shielded from 
material want and lived amid loving souls. The 
answer he found in the end seemed to lead by a 
straight road out of the wilderness of doubt and 
despair. The great majority, so he ascertained, 
are able to bear the burden of life because they 
heed the ancient injunction: "ora et lab or a" ; they 
work and they believe. Might he not sweeten his 
lot after the same prescription? Being of a deli- 
cate spiritual sensibility, he had long realized that 
people of the idle class were for the most part in- 
wardly indifferent to religion and in their actions 
defiant of its spirit. In the upper strata of society 
religious thought, where it exists, is largely adul- 
terated or weakened; sophisticated by education, 
doctored by science, thinned out with worldly am- 
bitions and with practical needs and considerations. 
The faith that supports life is found only among 
simple folk. For faith, to deserve the name, must 
be absolute, uncritical, unreasoning. Starting 
from these convictions as a basis, Tolstoy reso- 
lutely undertook to learn to believe; a determina- 
tion which led him, as it has led other ardent re- 

[182] 



Leo Tolstoy 

ligionists, so far astray from ecclesiastical paths 
that in due course of time he was unavoidably 
excommunicated from his church. His convictions 
made him a vehement antagonist of churchdom 
because of its stiffness of creed and laxness of 
practice. For his own part he soon arrived at a 
full and absolute acceptance of the Christian faith 
in what he considered to be its primitive and es- 
sential form. In "Walk Ye in the Light," 
(1893), the reversion of a confirmed worldling to 
this original conception of Christianity gives the 
story of the writer's own change of heart. 

To the period under discussion belongs Tol- 
stoy's drama, "The Power of Darkness," 
( 1 886) - 1 It is a piece of matchless realism, prob- 
ably the first unmixedly naturalistic play ever 
wrought out. It is brutally, terribly true to life, 
and that to life at its worst, both in respect of 
the plot and the actors, who are individualized 
down to the minutest characteristics of utterance 
and gesture. Withal it is a species of modern mo- 
rality, replete with a reformatory purpose that re- 
flects deeply the author's tensely didactic state of 
mind. His instructional zeal is heightened by in- 
timate knowledge of the Russian peasant, on his 

1 The only tragedy brought out during his life time. 

[183] 



Prophets of Dissent 

good side as well as on his bad. Some of his short 
stories are crass pictures of the muzhik's bestial 
degradation, veritable pattern cards of human and 
inhuman vices. In other stories, again, the deep- 
seated piety of the muzhik, and his patriarchal 
simplicity of heart are portrayed. As instance, 
the story of "Two Old Men," (1885), who are 
pledged to attain the Holy Land: the one per- 
forms his vow to the letter, the other, much the 
godlier of the two, is kept from his goal by a 
work of practical charity. In another story a 
muzhik is falsely accused of murder and accepts 
his undeserved punishment in a devout spirit of 
non-resistance. In a third, a poor cobbler who 
intuitively walks in the light is deemed worthy of 
a visit from Christ. 

In "The Power of Darkness," the darkest 
traits of peasant life prevail, yet the frightful pic- 
ture is somehow Christianized, as it were, so that 
even the miscreant Nikita, in spite of his mon- 
strous crimes, is sure of our profound compassion. 
We are gripped at the very heartstrings by that 
great confession scene where he stutters out his 
budget of malefactions, forced by his awakened 
conscience and urged on by his old father : "Speak 

[184] 



Leo Tolstoy 

out, my child, speak it off your soul, then you will 
feel easier." 

"The Power of Darkness" was given its coun- 
terpart in the satirical comedy, "Fruits of Cul- 
ture," (1889). The wickedness of refined society 
is more mercilessly excoriated than low-lived in- 
famy. But artistically considered the peasant 
tragedy is far superior to the "society play." 



Tolstoy was a pessimist both by temperament 
and philosophical persuasion. This is made mani- 
fest among other things by the prominent place 
which the idea of Death occupies in his writings. 
His feelings are expressed with striking simplicity 
by one of the principal characters in "War and 
Peace" : "One must often think of death, so that 
it may lose its terrors for us, cease to be an enemy, 
and become on the contrary a friend that delivers 
us from this life of miseries." Still, in Tolstoy's 
stories, death, as a rule, is a haunting spectre. This 
conception comes to the fore even long after his 
conversion in a story like "Master and Man." 
Throughout his literary activity it has an obses- 
sive hold on his mind. Even the shadowing of 
the animal mind by the ubiquitous spectre gives 
rise to a story: "Cholstomjer, The Story of a 

[185] 



Prophets of Dissent 

Horse," (1861), and in one of the earlier tales 
even the death of a tree is pictured. Death is 
most terrifying when, denuded of its heroic em- 
bellishments in battle pieces such as "The Death 
of a Soldier" ("Sebastopol") or the description 
of Prince Andrey's death in "War and Peace," it 
is exposed in all its bare and grim loathsomeness. 
Such happens in the short novel published in 1886 
under the name of "The Death of Ivan Ilyitch," 
— in point of literary merit one of Tolstoy's great- 
est performances. It is a plain tale about a mid- 
dle-aged man of the official class, happy in an 
unreflecting sort of way in the jog-trot of his work 
and domestic arrangements. Suddenly his fate is 
turned, — by a trite mishap resulting in a long, 
hopeless sickness. His people at first give him the 
most anxious care, but as the illness drags on 
their devotion gradually abates, the patient is 
neglected, and soon almost no thought is given to 
him. In the monotonous agony of his prostration, 
the sufferer slowly comes to realize that he is 
dying, while his household has gone back to its 
habitual ways mindless of him, as though he were 
already dead, or had never lived. All through this 
lengthened crucifixion he still clings to life, and it 
is only when the family, gathering about him 

[186] 



Leo Tolstoy 

shortly before the release, can but ill conceal their 
impatience for the end, that Ivan at last accepts 
his fate: "I will no longer let them suffer — I 
will die; I will deliver them and myself." So he 
dies, and the world pursues its course unaltered, — 
in which consists the after-sting of this poignant 
tragedy. 

Between the years 1879 and 1886 Tolstoy pub- 
lished the main portion of what may be regarded 
as his spiritual autobiography, namely, "The Con- 
fession," (1879, with a supplement in 1882), 
u The Union and Translation of the Four Gos- 
pels," (1881-2), "What Do I Believe?" (also 
translated under the title "My Religion," 1884) 
and "What Then Must We Do?" (1886). He 
was now well on the way to the logical ultimates 
of his ethical ideas, and in the revulsion from ar- 
tistic ambitions so plainly foreshown in a treatise 
in 1887 : "What is True Art?" he repudiated un- 
equivocally all his earlier work so far as it sprang 
from any motives other than those of moral teach- 
ing. Without a clear appreciation of these facts a 
just estimate of "The Kreutzer Sonata" (1889) 
is impossible. 

The central character of the book is a common- 
place, rather well-meaning fellow who has been 

[187] 



Prophets of Dissent 

tried for the murder of his wife, slain by him in a 
fit of insensate jealousy, and has been acquitted 
because of the extenuating circumstances in the 
case. The object of the story is to lay bare the 
causes of his crime. Tolstoy's ascetic proclivity 
had long since set him thinking about sex problems 
in general and in particular upon the ethics of 
marriage. And by this time he had arrived at 
the conclusion that the demoralized state of our 
society is chiefly due to polygamy and polyan- 
drism; corroboration of his uncompromising 
views on the need of social purity he finds in the 
evangelist Matthew, v 127-28, where the differ- 
ence between the old command and its new, far 
more rigorous, interpretation is bluntly stated: 
"Ye have heard that it was said by them of old 
time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say 
unto you that whosoever looketh on a woman to 
lust after her hath committed adultery with her 
already in his heart." 

Now Tolstoy thinks that society, far from con- 
curring in the scriptural condemnation of lewd- 
ness, caters systematically to the appetites of the 
voluptuary. If Tolstoy is right in his diagnosis, 
then the euphemistic term "social evil" has far 
wider reaches of meaning than those to which it is 

[188] 



Leo Tolstoy 

customarily applied. With the head person in 
"The Kreutzer Sonata," Tolstoy regards society 
as no better than a maison de tolerance conducted 
on a very comprehensive scale. Women are 
reared with the main object of alluring men 
through charms and accomplishments; the arts of 
the hairdresser, the dressmaker, and milliner, as 
well as the exertions of governesses, music mas- 
ters, and linguists all converge toward the same 
aim : to impart the power of attracting men. Be- 
tween the woman of the world and the profes- 
sional courtezan the main difference in the light 
of this view lies in the length of the service. Pozd- 
nicheff accordingly divides femininity into long 
term and short term prostitutes, which rather fan- 
tastic classification Tolstoy follows up intrepidly 
to its last logical consequence. 

The main idea of u The Kreutzer Sonata," as 
stated in the postscript, is that sexless life is best. 
A recommendation of celibacy as mankind's high- 
est ideal to be logical should involve a wish for 
the disappearance of human life from the globe. 
A world-view of such pessimistic sort prevents it- 
self from the forfeiture of all bonds with humanity 
only by its concomitant reasoning that a race for 
whom it were better not to be is the very one that 

[i8 9 ] 



Prophets of Dissent 

will struggle desperately against its summum bo- 
num. Since race suicide, then, is a hopeless de- 
sideratum, the reformer must turn to more prac- 
ticable methods if he would at least alleviate the 
worst of our social maladjustments. Idleness is 
the mother of all mischief, because it superinduces 
sensual self-indulgence. Therefore we must sup- 
press anything that makes for leisure and pleas- 
ure. At this point we grasp the meaning of Tol- 
stoy's vehement recoil from art. It is, to a great 
extent, the strong-willed resistance of a highly 
impressionable puritan against the enticements of 
beauty, — their distracting and disquieting effect, 
and principally their power of sensuous sugges- 
tion. 

The last extensive work published by Tolstoy 
was "Resurrection," (1889). In artistic merit it 
is not on a level with "War and Peace" and "Anna 
Karenina," nor can this be wondered at, consider- 
ing the opinion about the value of art that had 
meanwhile ripened in the author. 

"Resurrection" was written primarily for a con- 
structive moral purpose, yet the subject matter 
was such as to secrete, unintendedly, a corrosive 
criticism of social and religious cant. The satirical 
connotation of the novel could not have been more 
[190] 



Leo Tolstoy 

grimly brought home than through this fact, that 
the hero by his unswerving allegiance to Christian 
principles of conduct greatly shocks, at first, our 
sense of the proprieties, instead of eliciting our 
enthusiastic admiration. In spite of our highest 
moral notions Prince Nekhludoff, like that hum- 
bler follower of the voice of conscience in Gerhart 
Hauptmann's novel, impresses us as a "Fool in 
Christ." The story, itself, leads by degrees from 
the under-world of crime and punishment to a 
great spiritual elevation. Maslowa, a drunken 
street-walker, having been tried on a charge of 
murder, is wrongfully sentenced to transportation 
for life, because — the jury is tired out and the 
judge in a hurry to visit his mistress. Prince 
Nekhludoff, sitting on that jury, recognizes in the 
victim of justice a girl whose downfall he himself 
had caused. He is seized by penitence and re- 
solves to follow the convict to Siberia, share her 
sufferings, dedicate his life to her redemption. 
She has sunk so low that his hope of reforming 
her falters, yet true to his resolution he offers to 
marry her. Although the offer is rejected, yet the 
suggestion of a new life which it brings begins to 
work a change in the woman. In the progress of 
the story her better nature gradually gains sway 

[191] 



Prophets of Dissent 

until a thorough moral revolution is completed. 

"Resurrection" derives its special value from 
its clear demonstration of those rules of conduct 
to which the author was straining with every moral 
liber to conform his own life. From his ethical 
speculations and social experiments are projected 
figures like that of Maria Paulo vna, a rich and 
beautiful woman who prefers to live like a com- 
mon workingwoman and is drawn by her social 
conscience into the revolutionary vortex. In this 
figure, and more definitely still in the political con- 
vict Simonson, banished because of his educational 
work among the common people, Tolstoy studies 
for the first time the so-called "intellectual" type 
of revolutionist. His view of the "intellectuals" 
is sympathetic, on the whole. They believe that 
evil springs from ignorance. Their agitation is- 
sues from the highest principles, and they are 
capable of any self-sacrifice for the general weal. 
Still Tolstoy, as a thoroughly anti-political re- 
former, deprecates their organized movement. > 

Altogether, he repudiated the systems of social 
reconstruction that go by the name of socialism, 
because he relied for the regeneration of society 
wholly and solely upon individual self-elevation. 
In an essential respect he was nevertheless a so- 
[192] 



Leo Tolstoy 

cialist, inasmuch as he strove for the ideal of uni- 
versal equality. His social philosophy, bound up 
inseparably with his personal religious evolution, 
is laid down in a vast number of essays, letters, 
sketches, tracts, didactic tales, and perhaps most 
comprehensively in those autobiographical docu- 
ments already mentioned. Sociologically the most 
important of these is a book on the problem of 
property, entitled, u What Then Must We Do?" 
(1886), which expounds the passage in Luke 
iii:io, 11: "And the people asked him, saying, 
What shall we do then? He answered and saith 
unto them, He that hath two coats, let him impart 
to him that hath none; and he that hath meat, let 
him do likewise." Not long before that, he had 
thought of devoting himself entirely to charitable 
work, but practical experiments at Moscow dem- 
onstrated to him the futility of almsgiving. Speak- 
ing on that point to his English biographer, Ayl- 
mer Maude, 1 he remarked: "All such activity, if 
people attribute importance to it, is worthless." 
When his interviewer insisted that the destitute 
have to be provided for somehow and that the 
Count himself was in the habit of giving money 
to beggars, the latter replied: "Yes, but I do not 

1 "The Life of Tolstoy," Later Years, p. 643 f. 
[193] 



Prophets of Dissent 

imagine that I am doing good! I only do it for 
myself, because I know that I have no right to be 
well off while they are in misery." It is worth 
mention in passing that during the famine of 
1 89 1-2 this determined opponent of organized 
charity, in noble inconsistency with his theories, led 
in the dispensation of relief to the starving popula- 
tion of Middle Russia. 

But in "What Then Must We Do?" he treats 
the usual organized dabbling in charity as utterly 
preposterous : "Give away all you have or else you 
can do no good." . . . "If I give away a hundred 
thousand and still withhold five hundred thousand, 
I am far from acting in the spirit of charity, and 
remain a factor of social injustice and evil. At the 
sight of the freezing and hungering I must still 
feel responsible for their plight, and feel that 
since we should live in conditions where that evil 
can be abstained from, it is impossible for me in 
the position in which I deliberately place myself 
to be anything other than a source of general 
evil." 

It was chiefly due to the influence of two peas- 
ants, named Sutayeff and Bondareff, that Tolstoy 
decided by a path of religious reasoning to aban- 
don "parasitical existence," — that is, to sacrifice 
[194] 



Leo Tolstoy 

all prerogatives of his wealth and station and to 
share the life of the lowly. He reasoned as fol- 
lows: "Since I am to blame for the existence of 
social wrong, I can lessen my blame only by mak- 
ing myself like unto those that labor and are 
heavy-laden." Economically, Tolstoy reasons 
from this fallacy: If all men do not participate 
equitably in the menial work that has to be per- 
formed in the world, it follows that a dispropor- 
tionate burden of work falls upon the shoulders 
of the more defenseless portion of humanity. 
Whether this undue amount of labor be exacted 
in the form of chattel slavery, or, which is scarcely 
less objectionable, in the form of the virtual sla- 
very imposed by modern industrial conditions, 
makes no material difference. The evil conditions 
are bound to continue so long as the instincts that 
make for idleness prevail over the co-operative im- 
pulses. The only remedy lies in the simplification 
of life in the upper strata of the social body, over- 
work in the laboring classes being the direct result 
of the excessive demands for the pleasures and 
luxuries of life in the upper classes. 

To Bondareff in particular Tolstoy confessedly 
owes the conviction that the best preventive for 
immorality is physical labor, for which reason the 

[195] 



Prophets of Dissent 

lower classes are less widely removed from grace 
than the upper. Bondareft maintained on scrip- 
tural grounds that everybody should employ at 
least a part of his time in working the land. This 
view Tolstoy shared definitely after 1884. Not 
only did he devote a regular part of his day to 
agricultural labor; he learned, in addition, shoe- 
making and carpentry, meaning to demonstrate by 
his example that it is feasible to return to those 
patriarchal conditions under which the necessities 
of life were produced by the consumer himself. 
From this time forth he modelled his habits more 
and more upon those of the common rustic. He 
adopted peasant apparel and became extremely 
frugal in his diet. Although by natural taste he 
was no scorner of the pleasures of the table, he 
now eliminated one luxury after another. About 
this time he also turned strict vegetarian, then 
gave up the use of wine and spirits, and ultimately 
even tobacco, of which he had been very fond, was 
made to go the way of flesh. He practiced this 
self-abnegation in obedience to the Law of Life 
which he interpreted as a stringent renunciation 
of physical satisfactions and personal happiness. 
Nor did he shirk the ultimate conclusion to which 
his premises led: if the Law of Life imposes the 

[196] 



Leo Tolstoy 

suppression of all natural desires and appetites 
and commands the voluntary sacrifice of every 
form of property and power, it must be clear that 
life itself is devoid of sense and utterly undesir- 
able. And so it is expressly stated in his 
"Thoughts." 1 

To what extent Tolstoy was a true Christian 
believer may best be gathered from his own writ- 
ings, "What Do I Believe?" (1884), "On Life," 
(1887), and "The Kingdom of God is within 
You," (1893). Although at the age of seventeen 
he had ceased to be orthodox, there can be no 
question whatever that throughout his whole life 
religion remained the deepest source of his in- 
spiration. By the early eighties he had emerged 
from that acute scepticism that well-nigh cost him 
life and reason, and had, outwardly at least, made 
his peace with the church, attending services regu- 
larly, and observing the feasts and the fasts ; here 
again in imitating the muzhik in his religious prac- 
tices he strove apparently to attain also to the 
muzhik's actual gift of credulity. But in this en- 
deavor his superior culture proved an impediment 
to him, and his widening doctrinal divergence from 

^o. 434. 

[197] 



Prophets of Dissent 

the established church finally drew upon his head, 
in 1 89 1 , the official curse of the Holy Synod. And 
yet a leading religious journal was right, shortly 
after his death, in this comment upon the religious 
meaning of his life: "If Christians everywhere 
should put their religious beliefs into practice with 
the simplicity and sincerity of Tolstoy, the entire 
religious, moral, and social life of the world would 
be revolutionized in a month." The orthodox 
church expelled him from its communion because 
of his radicalism; but in his case radicalism meant 
indeed the going to the roots of Christian religion, 
to the original foundations of its doctrines. In the 
teachings of the primitive church there presented 
itself to Tolstoy a dumfoundingly simple code for 
the attainment of moral perfection. Hence arose 
his opposition to the established church which 
seemed to have strayed so widely from its own 
fundamentals. 

Since Tolstoy's life aimed at the progressive 
exercise of self-sacrifice, his religious belief could 
be no gospel of joy. In fact, his is a sad, gray, 
ascetic religion, wholly devoid of poetry and emo- 
tional uplift. He did not learn to believe in the 
divinity of Christ nor in the existence of a God 
in any definite sense personal, and it is not eveia 

[198] 



Leo Tolstoy 

clear whether he believed in an after-life. And 
yet he did not wrongfully call himself a Christian, 
for the mainspring of his faith and his labor was 
the message of Christ delivered to his disciples 
in the Sermon on the Mount. This, for Tolstoy, 
contained all the philosophy and the theology of 
which the modern world stands in need, since in 
the precept of non-resistance is joined forever the 
issue between the Law and the Gospel: u Ye have 
heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, 
and a tooth for a tooth : But I say unto you, That 
ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee 
on the right cheek, turn to him the other also." 

And farther on: "Ye have heard that it hath 
been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate 
thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your 
enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to 
them that hate you, and pray for them that despite- 
fully use you, and persecute you." . . . 

In this commandment Tolstoy found warrant 
for unswerving forbearance toward every species 
of private and corporate aggression. Offenders 
against individuals or the commonwealth deserve 
nothing but pity. Prisons should be abolished and 
criminals never punished. Tolstoy went so far 
as to declare that even if he saw his own wife or 

[ J 99l 



Prophets of Dissent 

daughters being assaulted, he would abstain from 
using force in their defense. The infliction of the 
death penalty was to him the most odious of 
crimes. No life, either human or animal, should, 
be wilfully destroyed. 

The doctrine of non-resistance removes every 
conceivable excuse for war between the nations. 
A people is as much bound as is an individual by 
the injunction: "Whosoever shall smite thee on 
the right cheek, turn to him the other also." War 
is not to be justified on patriotic grounds, for 
patriotism, far from being a virtue, is an enlarged 
and unduly glorified form of selfishness. Con- 
sistently with his convictions, Tolstoy put forth 
his strength not for the glory of his nation but for 
the solidarity of mankind. 

The cornerstones of Tolstoy's religion, then, 
were these three articles of faith. First, True 
Faith gives Life. Second, Man must live by labor. 
Third, Evil must never be resisted by means of 
evil. 

Outside of the sphere of religious thought it is 
inaccurate to speak of a specific Tolstoyan philos- 
ophy, and it is impossible for the student to sub- 
scribe unconditionally to the hackneyed formula of 
[200] 



Leo Tolstoy 

the books that Tolstoy "will be remembered as 
perhaps the most profound influence of his day on 
human thought." Yet the statement might be 
made measurably true if it were modified in ac- 
cordance with the important reservation made 
earlier in this sketch. In the field of thought he 
was not an original explorer. He was great only 
as the promulgator, not as the inventor, of ideas. 
His work has not enriched the wisdom of man by 
a single new thought, nor was he a systematizer 
and expounder of thought or a philosopher. In 
fact he possessed slight familiarity with philo- 
sophical literature. Among the older metaphysi- 
cians his principal guide was Spinoza, and in more 
modern speculative science he did not advance 
beyond Schopenhauer. To the latter he was not 
altogether unlike in his mental temper. At least 
he showed himself indubitably a pessimist in his 
works by placing in fullest relief the bad side of 
the social state. We perceive the pessimistic dis- 
position also through his personal behavior, see- 
ing how he desponded under the discords of life, 
how easily he lost courage whenever he undertook 
to cope with practical problems, and how sedu- 
lously he avoided the contact with temptations. It 
was only by an almost total withdrawal from the 
[201] 



Prophets of Dissent 

world, and by that entire relief from its daily and 
ordinary affairs which he owed to the devotion of 
his wife that Tolstoy was enabled during his later 
years to look upon the world less despairingly. 

Like his theology, so, too, his civic and economic 
creed was marked by the utmost and altogether 
too primitive simplicity. Political questions were 
of slight interest to him, unless they touched upon 
his vital principles. If, therefore, we turn from 
his very definite position in matters of individual 
conduct to his political views, we shall find that 
he was wanting in a program of practical changes. 
His only positive contribution to economic discus- 
sion was a persistent advocacy of agrarian reform. 
Under the influence of Henry George he became 
an eloquent pleader for the single tax and the 
nationalization of the land. This question he 
discussed in numerous places, with especial force 
and clearness in a long article entitled "A Great 
Iniquity." x He takes the view that the mission of 
the State, if it have any at all, can only consist 
in guaranteeing the rights of every one of its 
denizens, but that in actual fact the State protects 
only the rights of the propertied. Intelligent and 
right-minded citizens must not conspire with the 

1 Printed in the (London) Times of September 10, 1905. 
[202] 



Leo Tolstoy 

State to ride rough-shod over the helpless major- 
ity. Keenly alive to the unalterable tendency of 
organized power to abridge the rights of individu- 
als and to dominate both their material and spir- 
itual existence, Tolstoy fell into the opposite ex- 
treme and would have abolished with a clean sweep 
all factors of social control, including the right of 
property and the powers of government, and 
transformed society into a community of equals 
and brothers, relying for its peace and well-being 
upon a universal love of liberty and justice. 

By his disbelief in authority, the rejection of 
the socialists' schemes of reconstruction, his mis- 
trust of fixed institutions and reliance on individ- 
ual right-mindedness for the maintenance of the 
common good, Tolstoy in the sphere of civic 
thought separated himself from the political so- 
cialists by the whole diameter of initial principle ; 
he might not unjustly be classified, therefore, as 
an anarchist, if this definition were neither too 
narrow nor too wide. The Christian Socialists 
might claim him, because he aspires ardently to 
ideals essentially Christian in their nature, and 
there is surely truth in the thesis that "every 
thinker who understands and earnestly accepts 
the teaching of the Master is at heart a social- 
[203] 



Prophets of Dissent 

ist." At the same time, Christianity and Social- 
ism do not travel the whole way together. For 
a religion that enjoins patience and submission 
can hardly be conducive to the full flowering of 
Socialism. And Tolstoy's attitude towards the 
church differs radically from that of the Christian 
Socialists. On the whole one had best abstain 
from classifying men of genius. 

The base of Tolstoy's social creed was the non- 
recognition of private property. The effect of 
the present system is to maintain the inequality 
of men and thereby to excite envy and stir up 
hatred among them. Eager to set a personal ex- 
ample and precedent, Tolstoy rendered himself 
nominally penniless by making all his property, 
real and personal, over to his wife and children. 
Likewise he abdicated his copyrights. Thus^he 
reduced himself to legal pauperism with a com- 
pleteness of success that cannot but stir with envy 
the bosom of any philanthropist who shares Mr. 
Andrew Carnegie's conviction that to die rich is 
to die disgraced. 

Tolstoy's detractors have cast a plausible sus- 
picion upon his sincerity. They pointed out 
among other things that his relinquishment of 
pecuniary profit in his books was apparent, not 
t.204] 



Leo Tolstoy 

real. Since Russia has no copyright conventions 
with other countries, it was merely making a vir- 
tue of necessity to authorize freely the transla- 
tion of his works into foreign languages. As for 
the Russian editions of his writings, it is said that 
in so far as the heavy hand of the censor did not 
prevent, the Countess, as her husband's financial 
agent, managed quite skilfully to exploit them. 



Altogether, did Tolstoy practice what he pro- 
fessed? Inconsistency between principles and 
conduct is a not uncommon frailty of genius, as is 
notoriously illustrated by Tolstoy's real spiritual 
progenitor, Jean Jacques Rousseau. 

Now there are many discreditable stories in 
circulation about the muzhik lord of Yasnaya 
Polyana. He urged upon others the gospel com- 
mands: "Lay not up for yourselves treasures 
upon earth" and: "Take what ye have and give 
to the poor," and for his own part lived, accord- 
ing to report, in sumptuous surroundings. He 
went ostentatiously on pilgrimages to holy places, 
barefooted but with an expert pedicure attending 
him. He dressed in a coarse peasant blouse, but 
underneath it wore fine silk and linen. He was 
a vegetarian of the strictest observance, yet so 
[205] 



Prophets of Dissent 

much of an epicure that his taste for unseasonable 
dainties strained the domestic resources. He 
preached simplicity, and according to rumor dined 
off priceless plate; taught the equality of men, 
and was served by lackies in livery. He abstained 
from alcohol and tobacco, but consumed six cups 
of strong coffee at a sitting. Finally, he extolled 
the sexless life and was the father of thirteen chil- 
dren. It was even murmured that notwithstand- 
ing his professed affection for the muzhik and his 
incessant proclamation of universal equality, the 
peasantry of Yasnaya Polyana was the most 
wretchedly-treated to be found in the whole prov- 
ince and that the extortionate landlordism of the 
Tolstoys was notorious throughout the empire. 

Much of this, to be sure, is idle gossip, un- 
worthy of serious attention. Nevertheless, there 
is evidence enough to show that Tolstoy's in- 
sistence upon a literal acceptance of earlier Chris- 
tian doctrines led him into unavoidable incon- 
sistencies and shamed him into a tragical sense of 
dishonesty. 

Unquestionably Tolstoy lived very simply and 

laboriously for a man of great rank, means, and 

fame, but his life was neither hard nor cramped. 

Having had no personal experience of garret 

{206] 



Leo Tolstoy 

and hovel, he could have no first-hand practical 
knowledge of the sting of poverty, nor could he 
obtain hardship artificially by imposing upon him- 
self a mild imitation of physical discomfort. For 
the true test of penury is not the suffering of to- 
day but the oppressive dread of to-morrow. His 
ostensible muzhik existence, wanting in none of 
the essentials of civilization, was a romance that 
bore to the real squalid pauperism of rural Russia 
about the same relation that the bucolic make-be- 
lief of Boucher's or Watteau's swains and shep- 
herdesses bore to the unperfumed truth of a 
sheep-farm or a hog-sty. As time passed, and the 
sage turned his thoughts to a more rigid enforce- 
ment of his renunciations, it was no easy task for 
a devoted wife to provide comfort for him with- 
out shaking him too rudely out of his fond illusion 
that he was enduring privations. 

After all, then, his practice did not tally with 
his theory; and this consciousness of living con- 
trary to his own teachings was a constant source 
of unhappiness which no moral quibbles of his 
friends could still. 

Yet no man could be farther from being a hyp- 
ocrite. If at last he broke down under a burden 
of conscience, it was a burden imposed by the 
\ [207] 



Prophets of Dissent 

reality of human nature which makes it impossible 
for any man to live up to intentions of such rigor 
as Tolstoy's. From the start he realized that 
he did not conform his practice entirely to his 
teachings, and as he grew old he was resolved that 
having failed to harmonize his life with his be- 
liefs he would at least corroborate his sincerity 
by his manner of dying. Even in this, however, 
he was to be thwarted. In his dramatic ending, 
still plainly remembered, we feel a grim con- 
sistency with the lifelong defeat of his will to 
suffer. 

Early in 19 10 a student by the name of Manzos 
addressed a rebuke to Tolstoy for simulating the 
habits of the poor, denouncing his mode of life as 
a form of mummery. He challenged the sage to 
forsake his comforts and the affections of his 
family, and to go forth and beg his way from 
place to place. "Do this," entreated the young 
fanatic, "and you will be the first true man after 
Christ." With his typical large-heartedness, Tol- 
stoy accepted the reproof and said in the course 
of his long reply: 1 . . . "The fact that I am 
living with wife and daughter in terrible and 
shameful conditions of luxury when poverty sur- 

1 February 17, 19 10. 

[208] ■*>.-."..-•:- 



Leo Tolstoy 

rounds me on all sides, torments me ever more 
and more, and there is not a day when I am not 
thinking of following your advice. I thank you 
very, very much for your letter." As a matter 
of fact, he had more than once before made ready 
to put his convictions to a fiery proof by a final 
sacrifice, — leaving his home and spending his re- 
maining days in utter solitude. But when he 
finally proceeded to carry out this ascetic intention 
and actually set out on a journey to some vague 
and lonely destination, he was foiled in his pur- 
pose. If ever Tolstoy's behavior irresistibly pro- 
voked misrepresentation of his motives it was by 
this somewhat theatrical hegira. The fugitive 
left Yasnaya Polyana, not alone, but with his two 
favorite companions, his daughter Alexandra and 
a young Hungarian physician who for some time 
had occupied the post of private secretary to him. 
After paying a farewell visit to his sister, a nun 
cloistered in Shamardin, he made a start for the 
Trans-Caucasus. His idea was to go somewhere 
near the Tolstoy colony at the Black Sea. But 
in an early stage of the journey, a part of which 
was made in an ordinary third-class railway com- 
partment, the old man was overcome by illness 
and fatigue. He was moved to a trackman's hut 
[209] 



Prophets of Dissent 

at the station of Astopovo, not farther than eighty 
miles from his home, and here, — surrounded by 
his hastily summoned family and tenderly nursed 
for five days, — he expired. Thus he was denied 
the summit of martyrdom to which he had as- 
pired, — a lonely death, unminded of men. 



Even a summary review like this of Tolstoy's 
life and labors cannot be concluded without some 
consideration of his final attitude toward the es- 
thetic embodiment of civilization. The develop- 
ment of his philosophy of self-abnegation had led 
irresistibly, as we have seen, to the condemnation 
of all self-regarding instincts. Among these, Art 
appeared to him as one of the most insidious. He 
warned against the cultivation of the beautiful on 
the ground that it results in the suppression and 
destruction of the moral sense. Already in 1883 
it was known that he had made up his mind to 
abandon his artistic aspirations out of loyalty to 
his moral theory, and would henceforth dedicate 
his talents exclusively to the propagation of hu- 
manitarian views. In vain did the dean of Rus- 
sian letters, Turgenieff, appeal to him with a 
death-bed message: u My friend, great writer of 
the Russians, return to literary work! Heed my 
[210] 



Leo Tolstoy 

prayer." Tolstoy stood firm in his determination. 
Nevertheless, his genius refused to be throttled by 
his conscience; he could not paralyze his artistic 
powers; he could merely bend them to his moral 
aims. 

As a logical corollary to his opposition to art 
for art's sake, Tolstoy cast from him all his own 
writings antedating ''Confession," — and de- 
nounced all of them as empty manifestations of 
worldly conceit. His authorship of that immortal 
novel, "War and Peace," filled him with shame 
and remorse. His views on Art are plainly and 
forcibly expounded in the famous treatise on 
"What is Art?" and in the one on "Shakespeare." 
In both he maintains that Art, no matter of what 
sort, should serve the sole purpose of bringing 
men nearer to each other in the common purpose 
of right living. Hence, no art work is legitimate 
without a pervasive moral design. The only true 
touchstone of an art work is the uplifting strength 
that proceeds from it. Therefore, a painting like 
the "Angelus," or a poem like "The Man with the 
Hoe" would transcend in worth the creations of 
a Michael Angelo or a Heinrich Heine even as 
the merits of Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Goethe 
are outmatched in Tolstoy's judgment by those of 

[211] 



Prophets of Dissent 

Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot 
By the force of this naive reasoning and his theo- 
retical antipathy toward true art, he was led to see 
in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" the veritable, acme of 
literary perfection, for the reason that this book 
wielded such an enormous and noble influence 
upon the most vital question of its day. He 
strongly discountenanced the literary practice of 
revamping ancient themes, believing with Ibsen 
that modern writers should impart their ideas 
through the medium of modern life. Yet at the 
same time he was up in arms against the self- 
styled "moderns" ! They took their incentives 
from science, and this Tolstoy decried, because 
science did not fulfill its mission of teaching people 
how rightly to live. In this whole matter he rea- 
soned doggedly from fixed ideas, no matter to 
what ultimates the argument would carry him. 
For instance, he did not stick at branding Shake- 
speare as an utter barbarian, and to explain the 
reverence for such "disgusting" plays as "King 
Lear" as a crass demonstration of imitative 
hypocrisy. 

Art in general is a practice aiming at the pro- 
duction of the beautiful. But what is "beauti- 
ful"? asked Tolstoy. The current definitions he 
[212] 



Leo Tolstoy 

pronounced wrong because they were formulated 
from the standpoint of the pleasure-seeker. Such 
at least has been the case since the Renaissance. 
From that time forward, Art, like all cults of 
pleasure, has been evil. To the pleasure-seeker, 
the beautiful is that which is enjoyable; hence he 
appraises works of art according to their ability 
to procure enjoyment. In Tolstoy's opinion this 
is no less absurd than if we were to estimate the 
nutritive value of food-stuffs by the pleasure ac- 
companying their consumption. So he baldly de- 
clares that we must abolish beauty as a criterion 
of art, or conversely, must establish truth as the 
single standard of beauty. "The heroine of my 
stories whom I strive to represent in all her 
beauty, who was ever beautiful, is so, and will 
remain so, is Truth." 

His views on art have a certain analogy with 
two modern schools, — much against his will, 
since he strenuously disavows and deprecates 
everything modern; they make us think on the 
one hand of the "naturalists," inasmuch as like 
them Tolstoy eschews all intentional graces of 
style and diction ; and on the other hand of the 
"impressionists," with whom he seems united by 
his fundamental definition of art, namely that it 

['2 13] 



Prophets of Dissent 

is the expression of a dominant emotion calculated 
to reproduce itself in the reader or beholder. 
Lacking, however, a deep and catholic under- 
standing for art, Tolstoy, in contrast, with the 
modern impressionists, would restrict artists to 
the expression of a single type of sentiments, those 
that reside in the sphere of religious conscious- 
ness. To him art, as properly conceived and 
practiced, must be ancillary to religion, and its 
proper gauge is the measure of its agreement with 
accepted moral teachings. Remembering, then, 
the primitive form of belief to which Tolstoy con- 
trived to attain, we find ourselves face to face 
with a theory of art which sets up as the final 
arbiter the man "unspoiled by culture," and he, 
in Tolstoy's judgment, is the Russian muzhik. 



This course of reasoning on art is in itself 
sufficient to show the impossibility for any modern 
mind of giving sweeping assent to Tolstoy's teach- 
ings. And a like difficulty would be experienced 
if we tried to follow him in his meditations on any 
other major interest of life. Seeking with a tre- 
mendous earnestness of conscience to reduce the 
bewildering tangle of human affairs to elementary 
simplicity, he enmeshed himself in a new network 

[214] 



Leo Tolstoy 

of contradictions. The effect was disastrous for 
the best part of his teaching; his own extremism 
stamped as a hopeless fantast a man incontestably 
gifted by nature, as few men have been in history, 
with the cardinal virtues of a sage, a reformer, 
and a missionary of social justice. Because of 
this extremism, his voice was doomed to remain 
that of one crying in the wilderness. 

The world could not do better than to accept 
Tolstoy's fundamental prescriptions : simplicity of 
living, application to work, and concentration 
upon moral culture. But to apply his radical 
scheme to existing conditions would amount to a 
self-stultification of the race, for it would entail 
the unpardonably sinful sacrifice of some of the 
finest and most hard-won achievements of human 
progress. For our quotidian difficulties his ex- 
ample promises no solution. The great mass of 
us are not privileged to test our individual schemes 
of redemption in the leisured security of an ideal 
experiment station; not for every man is there a 
Yasnaya Polyana, and the Sophia Andreyevnas 
are thinly sown in the matrimonial market. 

But even though Tolstoyism will not serve as a 
means of solving the great social problems, it sup- 
plies a helpful method of social criticism. And its 

[215] 



Prophets of Dissent 

value goes far beyond that : the force of his influ- 
ence was too great not to have strengthened enor- 
mously the moral conscience of the world; he has 
played, and will continue to play, a leading part 
in the establishing and safeguarding of democ- 
racy. After all, we do not have to separate metic- 
ulously what is true in Tolstoy's teaching from 
what is false in order to acknowledge him as a 
Voice of his epoch. For as Lord Morley puts the 
matter in the case of Jean Jacques Rousseau: 
"There are some teachers whose distinction is 
neither correct thought, nor an eye for the exi- 
gencies of practical organization, but simply depth 
and fervor of the moral sentiment, bringing with 
it the indefinable gift of touching many hearts with 
love of virtue and the things of the spirit." 



[216] 





















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